


Corpus Callosum

by likethedirection



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Canon Timeline, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Aromantic Asexual Sherlock, Discussion of Disordered Eating, Discussion of Suicide/Death, Homophobic Language (briefly), Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Kidlock, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Moral Ambiguity, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Passage of time, Sherlock and Jim are brain-snobs, Slow Build, Teenlock, Underage Drinking, Unilock
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-14
Updated: 2016-06-29
Packaged: 2018-05-26 13:20:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 43,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6240871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likethedirection/pseuds/likethedirection
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But this is your favorite story, isn't it?  You find a boy like you.  I solve your murder.  You give me a challenge.  We meet.  Something begins, something that matters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Spring 1990

**Author's Note:**

> This story is what happens when I spend too much time wondering how different the lives of Sherlock Holmes and Jim Moriarty would have been if they had met before they were Hat Detective and The Name No One Mentions.
> 
> It will cover a long span of time, so if kidlock (tweenlock?) isn't your thing, don't worry, it's only for one chapter. :) Same deal for the teenlock tag, and probably same deal for the unilock tag. The bulk of this story will focus on their adult lives. Comments are GREATLY appreciated, as this is my first foray into fic-writing for this fandom. Enjoy!

On the day Sherlock turns thirteen, one of the cards he receives is not like the others.  It is plain, its message short, its tone formal almost to the point of parody.  The formality, of course, is not the point.

 

_To Mr William Sherlock Scott Holmes on the Occasion of His Thirteenth Birthday:_

_Cheers._

_\- M_

 

Later, Sherlock will become obsessed with the careful but unpracticed calligraphy, analyzing every curve and cross and dotted _i_.  He will deduce that the sender of his gift is a left-handed male, meticulous, working-class, and small in stature, with a flair for the dramatic.  He will bring the card to his nose and inhale deep, and eventually identify the shops that sell this particular card from its particular manufacturer, and place the sender somewhere inside the country, no oceans between them.  He will take a microscope to the ripped flap of the envelope, analyzing what he can of the traces of saliva, keeping his feet on the ground with the knowledge that the sender could easily have asked someone else to seal the envelope on his behalf.  He will run his fingertips over the text, over and over again, on dark days.

Later, he will do all of this.  Later.  At the moment, his mind is occupied with the series of letters and numbers written neatly underneath the message.

A series of letters and numbers written in neatly winding paths, playfully forming the shape of a very particular shoe.

Since Sherlock added his voice to the case of Carl Powers, no one has listened to him.  He has been dismissed, laughed at, jovially insulted.  He's been _patted on the head_.  When paired with the deeply inconvenient hormonal shifts that have been wreaking havoc with his sensibilities over the past year, this gross underestimation of his intellect, this hatefully patronizing drivel - like he’s just some _stupid kid_ \- has on a number of occasions driven him very nearly to violence.

But this.   _This._

He brushes his fingertips over the numbers and imagines the pen that wrote them, and the hand that held the pen, and the mind that moved the hand.  The other would have rested just there, holding the page in place. Sherlock places his fingers lightly where the murderer would have placed his own.

This, of course, is the truth of it.  So obvious as to go without saying, and for the first time all day, Sherlock smiles.

The card is from Carl Powers’s murderer, and he is saying hello.

-

The code is challenging, but not impossible, especially once he's identified the laces as its starting point.  Wonderfully, decoding Carl's shoe results in an address.

Not a home address, of course, for the murderer is not stupid.  It is a post office box, meant only for a letter, not for a visit.  But it's an address.  An invitation.  Sherlock spends hours locked in his room, running his fingers over his birthday card and considering how best to greet his new playmate.

He is at a disadvantage, because he does not know the murderer, though clearly the murderer has researched him, at least enough to know his full name, birth date, address, and intellectual interests.  None of those would be particularly difficult to find, but there is a boldness to the act of using that information to actually reach out.  It seems only polite to match it.

The murderer's message was formal, for the sole purpose of showing off what he knows.  Sherlock knows a few things now, too.  Share and share alike, and all that.

He sets off to obtain a shoe box.

It takes a bit of doing and a few white lies to get it, but it has to be the correct sort, the correct brand, the correct size.  It wouldn't do to be remiss with details when his murderer has taken such care.

Shoe box procured, Sherlock sets about compiling a small care package for his new friend.  Those bits are easy enough to find: a two-pack of pens, black and red, designed specifically for comfortable use in the left hand; a plain slate-gray handkerchief for the impending head-cold Sherlock identified from the traces of saliva on the envelope; a rain poncho in the murderer's approximate size, for the storms that will be making their way through most of the UK in the coming week; and, in the interest of symmetry, a card.

 

_To Mr M,_

_Thank you very kindly for the birthday present.  I have included a few small tokens I believe you will find useful.  I look forward to your reply._

_Cheers._

_W.S.S.H._

 

He spends an hour shut in his room, ignoring Dad and Mummy and Mycroft, arranging the items _just so_ .  It must be perfect.  Mycroft eyes him shrewdly when he finally emerges with his parcel, but Sherlock no longer sees the point in answering Mycroft's questions now that he's gotten boring - trying so hard to be a _proper adult_ \- so he doesn't.

He mails the package off in town.  He spends the next seventeen days quietly enduring his tingling fingers and itching brain.

On the eighteenth day, he receives a reply.  It is written entirely in code, a different code this time, with the exception of a brief message.

 

_Mr Holmes,_

_Sorry for the delay.  Fell a bit under the weather, but you knew that.  :)  I’m glad you liked my puzzle.  Give this one a go._

_Cheers._

_\- M_

 

To Sherlock’s delight, the murderer has written it all with his new pen.

-

It becomes a game, a marvelous game.  With each card that Sherlock races to the mailbox to snatch up, he receives a coded message, or an article snipped out of the newspaper, or a bit of a brochure or a ticket stub, and off he will go.  They’re _clever_ games, wonderfully clever, providing much-needed activity for his understimulated mind.  He works on them over summer hols when he’s meant to be practicing his violin, and he works on them under the covers by flashlight when he should be sleeping, and triumph spreads through his veins like sunlight when he comes up with a particularly clever presentation for his reply.

More importantly, with each puzzle, he learns just a bit more about his playmate.  The murderer is younger than he’d originally imagined, young enough to be in school, just like Sherlock, which gives him a quiet thrill every time he thinks of it.  His sense of humor is cheeky, theatrical, and delightfully wicked.  He has a taste for sweets.  He is regularly abused.

That one took some time for Sherlock to notice.  It isn’t until he’s noticed a speck of dry brown blood on the corner of a page, and then lined up the murderer’s letters and compared the handwriting with a keener eye, noting how often it betrays an injured hand, a stiff arm, a pain in the ribs, a mild concussion, that he makes the connection.  His friend is not one to brawl; that much is obvious by every indicator.  Therefore, someone else is hurting him.  In his next letter, Sherlock sends a little puzzle of his own, some clues of which happen to touch on a few simple techniques for self-defense against a larger opponent.  It’s not much - it certainly doesn’t assuage the unexpected anger Sherlock feels toward the invisible stranger causing damage to his playmate - but it at least sends the message that Sherlock knows, and is on his side.

His friend doesn’t comment on the clues, but the next letter to arrive includes two wrapped sweets. Sherlock takes a microscope to them immediately.  The sweets themselves have not been tampered with, but the insides of the wrappers are of interest.  One of them contains a drawn-on smiley face.  The other contains a chemical formula.

Sherlock immediately gets to work.

The formula leads Sherlock to a compound.  The compound leads him to a poison.  The poison leads him to the most likely source of ingredients, which leads him to a hunch, which leads him to a confirmation.

All together, it leads him to a name.

_-_

_To Mr James Michael Moriarty, Two Months and Sixteen Days Prior to the Occasion of his Fourteenth Birthday:_

_Cheers._

_W.S.S.M._

-

Waiting is agony.  Far worse, now, because he does not know what comes next, and meanwhile school has started again, a dull and unwanted distraction.  Sherlock fidgets, acts out, earns detentions, gets grounded, and takes a red pen to every single one of his textbooks to keep from running headlong out the window.  He curls up facing the wall and stubbornly doesn’t speak when Mummy comes in to give him a talking-to, secretly holding his birthday card to his chest, running his fingers over the text.

Mycroft visits on the weekend, home from university, certainly at Mummy’s request.

“You’re making a scene, Sherlock,” he reproaches while Sherlock practices this week’s violin piece as badly as he possibly can.

“ _You’re making a scene, Sherlock,_ ” Sherlock mimics, turning his back to his brother.  “ _I do whatever Mummy tells me to do and university’s made me fat._ ”

He screeches through the next variation while Mycroft stands silently behind him, pretending to be patient.

“Are you afraid you’ve frightened him off?” Mycroft asks quietly, almost lost under the violin’s squeal.  “Your little...pen pal?”

The violin lets out a truly ugly snarl as Sherlock whips around, yanking the bow across the strings.  “You’ve gone through my things!”

“Please,” Mycroft says, smug and patronizing and awful.  That tone was only ever meant to be aimed at dull people, _ordinary_ people.  Not him.  “You’ve hardly made a secret of it.  As you insist on constantly relocating _my_ things to _your_ room--”

“If they were so _important_ , you’d have taken them to university with you--”

“--I couldn’t help but notice you’ve kept the same card under your pillow for months--”

“ _Why_ would you be looking under my--”

“I didn’t have to.  You’ve been terribly transparent about the whole thing.  It’s no cause for a tantrum like this, behaving like a witless child, upsetting Mummy--”

“I’m not _witless_ ,” Sherlock growls back.  “At least I’ve got _someone_ who understands that.  You bloody well don’t.”

“Language,” Mycroft chides, and Sherlock rolls his eyes so hard that his head aches.  “It’s unfortunate, for your correspondent, that that’s what this is really about.  You’re upset that I’ve gone to university, that I’ve outgrown our little games--”

“ _Sorry?_ ”

“--and so you’ve grasped an opportunity to fill the vacuum with another marginally intelligent individual you’ve picked up along the way, who will play your games and make you feel clever.  Does he know that’s what he is?”

“It’s _not_ what he is!”  Sherlock barely keeps himself from throwing his practice violin to the floor, instead setting bow and instrument down less than gently on his bed.  “It’s not all about _you_ , Mycroft.  He’s got nothing to do with you.  He’s only mine.  He’s not _marginally intelligent_ , he’s _brilliant_ , probably cleverer than you!”  Probably not, but the spark of annoyance in Mycroft’s face is worth the lie.  “He doesn’t just make me _feel_ clever.  He _knows_ I’m clever.  He’s nothing like you.”

Mycroft’s face shifts, his brow lowering.  Quite suddenly, he’s taking this a bit more seriously.  “Oh, Sherlock.”

“What?” Sherlock snaps.

“You didn’t reach out to him, he reached out to you,” Mycroft murmurs, like he’s just worked it out and it pains him.  “Do you even know his name?”

Sherlock defiantly lifts his chin.  “Yes.”

“And do you know why he wrote you in the first place?”

A split-second’s hesitation, a split-second too long.  “Yes.”

“Sherlock.”  Mycroft takes a step forward, and Sherlock holds his ground.  “Listen to me--”

“Why?  Never done me any good before.”

“Be careful.”  Worry.  That’s what it is, that new shade in his brother’s face.  It gives Sherlock a vague desire to punch him in it.  “Perhaps you feel like you know this person, but there is no guarantee that their intentions--”

“I know more about him than you think--”

“Deductions,” Mycroft talks over him, “can only provide certain types of information.  Limited information.  Some things can’t be predicted.  There’s always something.”

Sherlock glares at him.  “I know that.  I’m not some _stupid kid_ , Mycroft.”

“No,” Mycroft says calmly, throwing Sherlock off, “in the scheme of things, you are not.  So it is in your best interest not to behave like one.”

Sherlock’s lip curls.  “Out of my room, Mycroft.”

“Stop ignoring Mummy, and behave in school.  I trust that’s not too complicated for you to manage.”

Louder, “ _Goodbye_ , Mycroft.”

Mycroft rolls his eyes and turns on his heel to leave Sherlock’s room.  On the way out, he pauses, scoffs, snatches up the tea mug from atop Sherlock’s dresser - Mycroft’s favorite, kept squirreled away in his room until Sherlock had relocated it to his own to think about smashing on bad days - and throws a last glare in Sherlock’s direction before closing the door behind him.

Sherlock heaves a sigh once he’s gone and sets his violin in its case, no longer in the mood to practice.  Flopping back onto his bed, he puts out the light and stares at the ceiling, retreating into his mind, the only place where the world behaves as it ought to.

James Michael Moriarty has not been frightened off.  He knows Sherlock by now; he knows that Sherlock wouldn’t put him in danger with the law, even if he does now have a name to connect to his crime.  Sherlock wouldn’t rob himself of his friend’s company, not so soon.  Not without knowing what could come next.

He supposes he is not, as Mycroft put it, ‘being careful.’  But Mycroft always advises that, because careful is what serves him.  The sorts of things he wants are the sorts of things one gets by being careful.  As Mycroft always seems to be forgetting, some time has passed since he and Sherlock have wanted the same sorts of things.

Under his pillow is something he wants.  This, whatever it is, this connection, _oh_ , he wants it.

“James Michael Moriarty,” he whispers into the dark, familiarizing his lips with its shape.  Practicing.  Two common names, one uncommon surname, transformed.  It could be a prayer.  Closing his eyes, he reaches for every detail he has uncovered about the breathing, thinking creature behind the name, putting together a blurry picture, an unfinished puzzle.  Nearly finished.  Barely started.

“James Michael Moriarty.”

-

The following Thursday, Sherlock checks the mail, and life is injected back into his limbs, his mind snapping awake.  He hurries to his room with his prize and locks the door behind him.  He opens the envelope with care and pulls the card out slowly, reverently.

 

_Mr Holmes,_

_:)_

_\- JM_

 

It’s a short code, this time, just a couple of lines, but the most complex one yet.  Sherlock starts on it immediately, adrenaline thrumming through his bloodstream, and he works on it for the next week, only barely enduring the distractions of school and music lessons and social interactions.  Part of the challenge is that the message itself seems to be its own code, by the time Sherlock has triple- and quadruple-checked his work:

 

_T=7499528, ETA + 3HR_

_L=1431989 POWERLESS_

 

_T_ for Time.   _L_ for Location.  This is not just another of his puzzles; this is an invitation, a real one this time.  He wants to meet.

He wants to meet, if Sherlock is clever enough to work out when and where.

An invisible Mycroft in the back of his mind is looking sharply at him, warning, but he’s just as easy to ignore as any other version of Mycroft.  Sherlock gets to work.

The location is the easy part: _1431989_ , 14 March 1989, a date Sherlock knows intimately.  The day Carl Powers died.  The day the world became _Powerless_ , which makes Sherlock snort at his friend’s humor.  But the date isn’t the important part; this is about the location.  The place where, on 14 March 1989, Carl Powers left this world.  London Swimming Pool.  A bit of research tells Sherlock that the pool is currently closed for construction, and will not reopen until summer of next year.  Presumably, then, they will have the place to themselves.

That leaves the time.  This is trickier.

Sherlock gets back to work.

-

Accessing the closed pool is a simple enough task.  Locks have never been a problem, and Sherlock looks old enough after his growth spurt that fewer people question why he’s hanging about unsupervised.  He slips in and silently shuts the door behind him.

It’s off hours for the construction crew, it seems; the building is motionless.  There is nothing to be done about the echo of his footsteps past the lobby and down the halls, or about the maddening flutter of anticipation that has started up underneath his skin, so he lifts his chin and foregoes stealth.  There should be only one other person here, and that person will be expecting him, anyway.

He’s got the time right.  He’s certain.  Mostly certain.   _7499528_ , the serial number of a bus assigned to bring a group of middle-schoolers into London for a day trip today.   _ETA_ _\+ 3HR_ , Estimated Time of Arrival plus three hours.  The bus should have arrived two hours and forty-nine minutes ago, precisely.

Sherlock allows himself one deep breath before pulling open the door to the pool.

He’s been here once before, back when he’d just seized upon the Carl Powers case and wanted to rule out all unrelated information before presenting his conclusion to the police.  It is a different place entirely now, building abandoned and pool drained of water, only the exit signs and emergency lights switched on.  They bathe the room in an eerie glow, and the piece of Sherlock that thrills at grand adventures is secretly pleased.

No one seems to be here yet, so Sherlock stays by the door, licking his lips and running his fingertips over the birthday card in his pocket (brought with, in case proof is required that he is, indeed, himself).  He takes a closer look at his surroundings while he waits, noting a few mildly interesting details that don’t quite fit, idly drumming his fingers against his leg.

He knows he got the time right.  There is nothing else the code could mean.  He’s _certain._

Across the room, something shifts.  Sherlock is at attention immediately, and he watches, heart pounding, as someone steps from the shadowed corner containing the room’s second door.  He doesn’t blink, taking in data the moment it becomes available, and he can tell with one look that this is it.  This is him.

Sherlock takes a couple of steps out of his own shadows, only a few, stopping when his host does, each of them spotlighted now by his own emergency light on the wall, and he can really observe, really _look_.  His murderer stands before him at last.

And oh, he is _exquisite_.

He is perfect, so much better than Sherlock imagined.  He's _small_ , certainly having not yet hit any growth spurt the likes of which Sherlock endured last year.  Based on the proportions of his hands and feet, a growth spurt of that magnitude is unlikely to be in his future.  The last traces of baby fat round out the murderer's cheeks, one of which sports a shadow of bruising high near his temple.  His hair is dark and messy; his eyes, darker and messier.

A boy, not a man.  An equal.

An _equal_.

The murderer smiles at him.  It could easily be mistaken for a shy thing, just a mild curve of his thin lips, but Sherlock does not make that sort of mistake.  What lies behind the smile is exactly what lies behind the one Sherlock gives him in answer: recognition.

_There you are._

They spend a long moment simply observing one another before something in the air seems to shift, and as one, they animate.  It feels ceremonial, ritualistic, this slow advance toward one another.  It feels like a leap from a great height.  It feels like there is a magnet in Sherlock’s chest, reaching for its opposite, pulling him forward.

They stop a few paces away from each other.  The murderer puts his hands in his pockets, a casual front, nervous energy making itself known in his lips and his eyelids and the distribution of his weight.

"Found you," Sherlock says, quietly thrilled, quietly euphoric.

The boy’s eyes grow warm.  His voice is soft.  "Found me."

There is something profound in that exchange, those first words spoken and heard, and Sherlock tucks it away in the back of his mind, where he can replay it when he needs it.

His host takes him in, head to foot to head again, his eyes slightly narrow, his teeth almost invisibly worrying the inside of his bottom lip, and Sherlock greedily files it all away.  This is what James Michael Moriarty looks like when he’s observing, complete with the little unconscious quirks.  (Sherlock has been told that he himself tends to steeple his fingers without noticing, and that his face just sort of stops, to the discomfort of most people around him.)  After a moment, he seems to reach a conclusion.

“You don’t go by William,” the boy murmurs slowly, and Sherlock could kiss him.

He opts instead to shake his head.  “Sherlock Holmes,” he introduces himself, and the boy’s face brightens, as though some small hope was just made real.  Sherlock commits the expression to memory and studies him in turn, reaching a conclusion of his own, delightful in its symmetry.  “You don’t go by James.”

The boy smiles like he could cry, and he shakes his head.  “Jim Moriarty,” he says, the lilt of an Irish accent coming through his last name.  Unexpected, wonderful.  He looks Sherlock up and down again, shaking his head a little as though not entirely sure he’s real.  “Hi.”

Sherlock knows the feeling.  “Hello.”

Jim breaks their gaze, looking around a moment, then goes to the edge of the drained swimming pool and tears down the caution tape with a careless tug.  Sherlock gets the message, and they perch side by side on the edge over the deep end, their feet dangling in the air.

“Sorry,” Jim says as they settle in, “for lurking.  It wasn’t polite.  I just wanted to see what you would do.”

Precisely what Sherlock would have done.  “I don’t mind.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

Sherlock pulls his eyes from the drain at the pool’s bottom, the unusual discoloration around it going neatly with the interesting details he noticed while he was waiting, and turns to Jim.  “What did you think?”

“That I’d like you.”  He states it simply, neither smiling nor frowning.  “I do.”

“Because I’m as clever as you thought.”

“That’s one reason.”  He doesn’t volunteer the implied other reasons.  “What did _you_ think?”

Sherlock answers honestly, “That there was a significant chance you’d be a psychopath.”  

Jim chuckles easily, and Sherlock files that sound away, too.  “And you’re here now.”

“Well, of course.”  They share a crooked smile.  “I also thought you might ask me to confirm that I’m who I say I am.”  

He pulls the card out of his jacket pocket, and Jim sparks to attention. Exhaling a laugh, he reaches into his own pocket and pulls out a familiar black lefty-pen.  He gives it a dextrous twirl in his fingers and holds it out.  “Trade?”

Sherlock takes the pen and hands the card over, swallowing an irrational pang of distress at someone else handling his card, even if it is the very sender.  “I’ll want that back.”

Jim doesn’t look up from the card.  “Oh, try to keep that pen and I’ll toss you right in.”

Sherlock glances down the dry 5.5-meter drop, not deep enough to kill but enough to hurt, and nods, relieved that the importance of the items is understood.  Thus appeased, he lifts the pen to eye-level to study it, the same way Jim is studying the card.  He’s pleased to see that the pen has been well-used, both for writing and possibly for a bit of sketching, or at least doodling, going by the indents that have formed on the grip.  The end of the pen has been regularly chewed, not nervously, just idly.  It has otherwise been kept in excellent condition, carrying none of the tiny scrapes indicative of being kept with other writing utensils.  Jim has kept this pen somewhere separate, somewhere special.

Next to him, Jim is surely noting the details of how Sherlock has handled his card, the slightly worn corners from its adventures under Sherlock’s pillow, the effects of the oils in his fingers on the paper from tracing and tracing.  When Sherlock glances at Jim’s hands - small square palms, slim pianist-fingers - he is warmed to see that they are handling the card with the utmost care.  Sherlock brings the pen closer to himself, taking extra caution not to drop it.

Once they are both satisfied, they trade back, Sherlock’s shoulders relaxing as he returns the card to his own pocket, Jim pressing a light kiss to the chewed end of his pen before putting it away.

Solemnly, Jim says, “I believe you’re either Sherlock Holmes, or you’ve done away with him and taken his property.  Suppose that means you’re clever enough either way.”

Sherlock snorts, earning a grin, and asks, “What do you draw?”

“This and that,” Jim shrugs.  “I get bored.”

Sherlock catches his eye.  “What do you really draw?”

Jim looks back for a long moment, then answers, “Star charts.”

Sherlock’s eyebrows go up.  “Really?”

“Mm.”  Jim looks at the ceiling as though he can spy the stars beyond it.  “I like them.  Have you been stressed lately?”  He brings his gaze back down.  “The text,” he explains, and Sherlock catches up.  Of course, there would be signs that he’s been running his fingers over the text more often and more vigorously these last few weeks.

With a noncommittal tilt of his head, Sherlock replies truthfully, “Argued with my brother.  He’s aggravating by virtue of existing.”

Jim hums.  “Right, the star student.  Mycroft, was it?”

“I never told you his name.”

“You never told me yours,” Jim reminds him, and even though Sherlock has been well aware of this from the beginning, it’s strangely disconcerting to imagine Jim putting the same care and effort into the research of his brother.

It impels him to put an end to this initial game, this testing of the waters, and reach for something of more immediate substance.

“Why did you write to me?”

Jim looks a bit put out about moving on so quickly, but only for a moment.  He shrugs again.  “It was your birthday.”

Cheeky.  Sherlock presses, “Why else?”

Jim lowers his eyes to the pool’s bottom, idly kicking his feet, silent.  Sherlock takes in the body language, fascinated.  Whatever it is, Jim is not ashamed of it.  He’s not afraid.  It’s a bit hard to tell what he is.

“If I was the only one asking the right questions about Carl Powers,” Sherlock continues when he gets no answer, “then I’m more dangerous to you than anyone else.  I’d already gone to the police once.  Why risk exposing yourself by reaching out to me?”

Quietly, Jim says, “They laughed at you, didn’t they?”

When Sherlock only stares at his profile, unsure how to respond, Jim clarifies, “The police.  No, of course they did.  That’s what they do to us, the others.  They don’t understand, can’t understand, so they laugh.  Try to make us less, because they can’t accept that we’re so much more.”  He lifts his eyes straight ahead, something glittering behind them, and for a moment Sherlock glimpses the boy who could, would, did carry out a calculated, premeditated murder all on his own.  “Have you thought about it before?  About how it would feel to stop them laughing?”

Sherlock replies again with the truth.  “Yes.”

Jim nods a little, still looking forward.  “I thought you might, at first,” he murmurs.  “Collect your evidence from the letters, put it all together, take it to the police again to shut them up.  Have a nice I-told-you-so.  You could do it with what I gave you, eventually, you’re plenty clever enough.  You’d get to be a hero for a bit.  I’d go merrily off to detention.  Lady Justice sings on.”  He seems unfazed by the thought, still kicking his feet.  “But you didn’t.”

“I still could,” Sherlock points out, for the sake of argument.  “I could leave here and go straight to the police station.  I know your name, your face, your school, the serial number of the bus that brought you here.  Why are you so sure I wouldn’t?”

Jim tilts his head.  “I trust you.”

Sherlock squints at him.  “You don’t know me.”

Jim turns to him, his dark eyes alien in the low light.  They flick from Sherlock’s face to his clothes, to his hands, to his knees, a far more intense scrutiny than before, when they had both just emerged from the shadows.  

Softly, slowly, he says, “You feel like you should be frightened to be here with me, but you’re not.”  He lifts his gaze back up to meet Sherlock’s.  “You feel like that about a lot of things.  Bad things.  Like you should feel worse about them than you do.”

Sherlock swallows, and Jim’s eyes drop to his hands.  “You don’t care about Carl Powers.  Why should you?  You care that the people who’re meant to be experts handled it wrong.  You care that idiots get a listen because they’ve been idiots longer than you’ve been brilliant.  You care that the puzzle was left undone.”

His voice never rises, and his expression never clears.  “You haven’t got friends.  Not real ones.  You know you can’t rely on anyone for what you need, so you rely on you.  You used to rely on your brother, but then he left you alone in Neverland.  Went and grew up, and forgot how to fly.”

Sherlock feels a bizarre desire to cover himself, to keep Jim from continuing to peek underneath his skin.  It has occurred to him that deducing people to themselves causes them discomfort, but he has never been on the receiving end, not by anyone but Mycroft. Jim murmurs, "You haven't forgiven him for that, yet."

Narrowing his eyes, Sherlock grabs back the reins.  "You're anxious, more than most people.  It's in your fingernails."  He lowers his gaze to them, the neat, barely-there slivers of white over pink.  "They're trimmed carefully, very close, so close it must have hurt, but your cuticles are ragged."  He lifts his eyes.  "You nibble.  You're trying to stop, because you don't like how it looks, and you're a bit vain."

Jim chuckles, unbothered, though the intense, unnameable something hasn’t left his eyes.  "Tell me what else I am."

Sherlock studies him, carefully avoiding anything he'd have already pointed out in his letters.  "You're used to being ignored, and you like it that way.  You like people to forget you're there, until you want them to remember."

"Where'd you get that?"

"Your shoes."

Jim lifts his feet to study his sneakers, and it only takes a moment for him to catch up, his eyes flicking to the pattern of worn spots that speak to a purposefully quiet walker, habitual by now.  "Oh.  That's good."

"That's easy,” Sherlock dismisses.  “You tend toward obsession.  You latch on to the ideas of things.  The idea of a person,” he says pointedly.  Jim’s smile slowly fades, and he just watches.  “But it’s not the person, not really.  You just made me into Peter Pan.  You put me in a story, and your eyebrows raised, and your head tilted forward.  You liked that bit.”

“Which means?”

"You see the world in stories," Sherlock says, not sure whether he means to observe or accuse, not entirely sure how he feels at all.  "It's how you cope."

"The way you cope by seeing it in atoms."

Sherlock frowns.  "It _is_ atoms."

"They _are_ stories."

They go silent for a moment, watching each other in a silent challenge.  Jim is more tense than he looks.  He has control over his muscles, especially his face, but his body is showing subtle signs of an elevated heart rate.  This moment, this conversation, means something to him.

"But this," Sherlock says slowly, working it out, "this is your favorite story, isn't it?  You find someone like you.  I solve your murder.  You give me a challenge.  We meet.  Something begins, something that matters."  Jim has gone eerily still.  Sherlock presses on, reading him as closely as he's tried to read anyone.  "But you're worried.  You're worried I'm going to spoil it.  By being ordinary after all."

"You won't," Jim says softly and immediately, unblinking.  "You're not."

Sherlock's mouth abruptly wants to smile, but he's busy, so he'll do that later.  Jim is worried, still.  The tension is there.  Sherlock narrows his eyes.  "By rejecting you, then."

Something happens in Jim, something physiological, subtle, significant.  There it is.

"You're worried that I'll choose to see how we're different," Sherlock pushes on.  "I’ll decide that you're the wrong kind of broken.  And I’ll walk away from here, leave you, and spoil the story.  End it before it starts.”

“But you won’t,” Jim murmurs, his voice quietly confident, but his eyes have sparked alive, feverish, less of a _Please don’t_ and more of a _You can’t, or the earth will crack in two._  “You won’t do that.”   _You can’t, or the sky will burn._

It's fascinating, the story his face tells when he's barely moving it, when he cares, when he’s trying to hide, failing to hide.  Sherlock forgets to reply, too busy studying him, pulling out wisps of words.

_Anxious. Restless. Genius. Alone. Creative. Stifled. Lacks empathy. Extravert. Isolated. Obsessive. Desperate. Alone. Dislikes authority. Manic tendencies. Abandonment issues. Guarded. Bullied. Patient. Manipulative. Unwillingly medicated. Understimulated. Violent._

_Alone._

He separates them in his mind, the reasons to leave and the reasons to stay.  The shadow versus the mirror.

_Obsessive. Desperate. Manipulative. Manic tendencies. Abandonment issues. Violent._

He inhales.  Vaguely, belatedly, he wonders that he's been able to get this far into his thought process without interruption, and he realizes that it's because Jim is letting him.  ( _Patient._ )  He's holding still, waiting, allowing himself to be studied.  His gaze is unwavering, impenetrable.  ( _Guarded._ )

Jim waits, because he understands.  He understands.

_Restless creative stifled isolated dislikes authority lacks empathy genius genius genius alone alone alone--_

He exhales.

"No," he agrees softly, watching Jim's expression shift by millimeters.  "I won't."

Barely a twitch, and everything's changed.  Sherlock could analyze Jim's microexpressions for weeks.  As it is, Sherlock quirks up the side of his mouth and adds, "But I will inform you that I know why the pool is really closed."

Jim's eyes light up.  Mischief, delight, staggering relief, and they leave the conversation behind.  "Show me."

He does.

Jim shadows him through the building while Sherlock points out the placement of the yellow tape, the tools used in dismantling particular sections of the building, the condition of the pool's floor.  He keeps silent, nodding minutely along when Sherlock talks through the correct logical process, faintly smiling when he's impressed, lifting his chin by centimeters when Sherlock has missed something.  (Tilting his head in acknowledgement when Sherlock discovers what he's missed, usually within sixty seconds.)

The pool construction is legitimate.  The need for it is legitimate.  The reason it started in the first place, Sherlock concludes, can only trace back to one of the pool mechanisms being tampered with, approximately two months ago.  Two months ago, when Sherlock had opened Jim's latest letter and deduced that he had recently returned to the scene of his crime, noting traces of chlorine and signs he'd written it on a bus or train.

It's a brilliant bit of mischief.  Untraceable, unless one is quite specifically looking for it.  All so that the two of them would have the place to themselves.

When Sherlock has finished, he turns to find Jim smiling at him with something like fondness, something like pride, and nothing resembling surprise.

With amusement, Jim asks,  “Do you know how fast you talk when you’re showing off?”

“It’s not showing off,” Sherlock sniffs.  “It’s logic.”

“Your rate of words per second _triples_.  Do you do that on purpose?”

Sherlock mocks a smile.  “Trouble keeping up?”

Jim chuckles and shakes his head.  “It’s funny.  Having to keep up at all.”

Sherlock automatically runs his fingers against the card in his pocket, an action he now associates with the very sensation Jim describes.  Jim catches the movement and looks pleased, but doesn’t mention it.

“It is,” Sherlock agrees.  Then, turning away toward the steps leading into the shallow end, “And no, it’s not on purpose.  But I don’t see any reason to change it, so I suppose that makes it a bit deliberate.”

Jim follows him, tearing down another line of caution tape and continuing down the steps when they reach them.  “You shouldn’t.  Why change it?"

“Teacher’s orders, usually,” Sherlock says with distaste, following Jim into the emptied pool.  It’s been a quietly persistent point of conflict at school since he was much younger, in large part due to his refusal to comply.  It is also a point of deep frustration.  “I don’t see why _I_ should change my speech patterns because _they_ can’t keep up.  If you’re supposedly the teacher, teach them to listen.  Teach them to _think_.”

“Cheers,” Jim mutters in agreement, just as Sherlock’s fingers drift over the same word on the card in his pocket, and the frustration fades.  Sherlock smiles.

“Cheers.”

Jim doesn’t turn around as they move down the slope into the deep end, but his ears move like he’s smiling as well, and he reaches a hand behind him, toward Sherlock.  An invitation.  It’s unexpected, and Sherlock hesitates, but only for a moment, before curiosity wins out.  He takes Jim’s hand.

Sherlock just has time to note how very much warmer Jim’s fingers are than his own before Jim is slowing, looking between the pool’s bottom and the floor above as though calculating an angle.  “Here,” he murmurs, backing up a couple of steps and pulling Sherlock along.  “Just about...here.”

He tugs gently on Sherlock’s hand, and Sherlock complies, stepping forward into Jim’s space, following his gaze up toward the ceiling.  Or, perhaps, toward the imagined surface of the water.  Jim measures one more angle with his eyes, then nods, looking upward.  “He was right there.”

Sherlock quietly pulls in a breath.  He doesn’t need to ask who.

He can picture it.  In his mind’s eye, the overhead lights spring to life, the echoing shouts of children and reprimands of their carers bounce from wall to wall, and water rushes in around the two of them, submerging them, dulling the sound.  Directly above their heads, Carl Powers treads water.  Until, abruptly, he is not treading water anymore.

He pauses the image in his mind, because he knows what comes next.  Without looking away from the phantom Powers, he asks, “Why him?”

Voice low, distracted, like he’s seeing it too, Jim replies, “Stopped him laughing, didn’t I?”

Unsurprising.  Almost logical.  “Did he hurt you?”

Jim’s hand shifts in Sherlock's.  Without inflection, he murmurs, “Every day.”

Sherlock swallows.  His next question is, perhaps, a bit not good.  Somehow, he doesn't think Jim will mind.

“What did it feel like?”

Jim doesn't laugh at his wickedness, or scoff at his naivety.  He considers.  “Like...any other experiment, really.  When it goes right.  It felt nice to see the pieces all come together.  Other than that,” his frown becomes audible in his words, “I was actually a bit disappointed.”

“Disappointed in what?”

Jim shrugs, his voice growing a bit heavy, a bit gray.  “I’d thought it would be harder.”

Sherlock hums understanding, because he is well acquainted with that particular disappointment.  His mindscape remains deep and very blue, the lights above silhouetting the frozen victim.  “Will you do it again?”

“Dunno,” Jim says, then backpedals.  “Well, I do know.  Once more.  It won’t be very interesting, though.”

There are many questions Sherlock could ask about that, so many that he takes a moment to respond, but the one he settles on is, “Who will it be?”

He had forgotten about Jim's hand, so it's unexpectedly jarring when it slips out of his.  All at once, the scene vanishes.  The pool is empty, and the light is dim.  They are alone.

Disoriented, Sherlock blinks rapidly and brings his gaze back down.  Jim smiles quietly back at him.  “Not you,” he answers.

"Should I be flattered?" Sherlock asks wryly.

"Well, no," Jim says, looking at him sideways.  "I'm not a serial killer.  If I were, I'd have enjoyed it more."

"Serial killers don't just enjoy it," Sherlock argues, because this is a subject he knows.  He'd always found it interesting, but far more so after he'd gone to the police.  "It’s a compulsion.  Suppose you found a cleverer way to murder someone, a way that didn't disappoint you.  Would you keep doing it?"  Jim doesn't answer, watching Sherlock with his head cocked to the side.  Sherlock continues, "Or it may have already started.  You're planning on only one more, but say that one bores you, too, so you come up with a better way.  You try that out, and it's better, but still not enough.  And you keep experimenting and experimenting, and before long you've got a trail of victims behind you that goes back decades."

Jim laughs, leaning back against the pool's side.  He's brought his pen back out of his pocket, and he starts to twirl it idly between his fingers.  "Thought about this, have you?  I'd almost think you _wanted_ me to be a serial killer."

Sherlock grins back.  "I'd almost think you're considering it."

Jim makes a show of weighing the pros and cons in his mind, tapping the pen thoughtfully against his cheek, then wrinkles his nose.  "Nah.  There are more interesting hobbies."

"Like star charts?" Sherlock challenges.

Jim's eyes twinkle.  "Like...violin?"  He grins when Sherlock's eyebrows go up.  "Calluses on your fingers.  Did guess a bit, though," he admits, going back to twirling the pen.  "You don't seem like the viola sort."

"No," Sherlock agrees.  "But I wouldn't call it my favorite hobby.  And I don't think the star charts are yours."

"No?"

"No.  I further propose," Sherlock says, advancing forward another step, "that this particular hobby is one that we share."

It's all talk, and they both know it.  Jim is quietly beaming.  "How interesting," he says, lifting the pen to twirl it conspicuously next to his face.  "I wonder what it could be."

Sherlock brushes his fingers over the card in his pocket again and musters a bit of courage, a bit of caution.  "Personally,” he says, carefully watching Jim’s face,  “I’m not inclined to stop.”

For the first time since he walked through the door, Sherlock seems to have truly caught Jim off guard.  His expression does all sorts of interesting things in the span of a second, his eyebrows popping up and then twitching down, his eyes fluttering and then narrowing, his mouth seeming to attempt to form multiple words at once.  Then the second has passed, and Jim asks, “Who said anything about stopping?”

“No one,” Sherlock says, the anxious flutter threatening to slip back under his skin.  “I just thought I’d...clarify.  We’ve met in person, now.  It feels like a bit of an...escalation.  I wasn’t certain--”

“Sherlock.”  It’s another of many firsts today, Jim saying his chosen name aloud, and they both pause for a moment in deference to it.  Then Jim quietly says, “This was never meant to be an end.  It was meant,” he hesitates, wetting his lips, the only sign of uncertainty his body betrays, “...meant to be a start.”

Oh.

_Oh._

The flutter has returned to the cage of Sherlock’s ribs with a vengeance.  “You want to meet again.”

“Of course,” Jim chuckles, seeming to relax after watching Sherlock closely for a moment.  “I can’t get away often.  I’m a bit out of the way, and school trips like this are a bit rare.  Weekends aren’t any good, what with the prison warden stomping about at home.”  It’s the first Jim has spoken of his abuser, and Sherlock pays closer attention.  “But on occasion...”  He shrugs.  “If you like.”

Sherlock does not think about it, because he has already done that, and there is no longer anything to think about.  He smiles.  

“Yes.”

Jim’s answering smile is a cover, an acceptable mask holding back something bigger, more passionate, more joyful.  He teases, “Not calling Scotland Yard, then?”

“I suppose not,” Sherlock says.  His eyes fall upon the bruise high on Jim’s cheekbone, and he fights himself for a moment, then carefully asks, “Is there anyone else I should call?”

Jim blinks twice, then understands.  Immediately his face goes perfectly neutral, impossible to read, impossible to deduce, though perhaps that is telling enough in itself.  He shakes his head.  Then he abruptly pushes off the wall and starts wandering back up the slope.  Turning toward the wall, at a more manageable height now, he asks, “Puzzles or scavenger hunts?”

Sherlock watches him heft himself up to the ledge and pull himself out of the pool, and moves to the wall to follow suit.  “Alone, or accompanied?”

“Does it matter?” Jim asks, brushing his hands off against his trousers and helpfully tugging more caution tape out of Sherlock’s way, and Sherlock supposes it doesn’t.

“I like either, if they’re well-made,” he says, straightening up, “but if I have to choose, then scavenger hunts.  More of a challenge, more moving parts.  And my mother sets my brother on me if I go too long without leaving my room.”

Jim hums.  “Speaking of.  How long before they send out a search party?”

Sherlock glances at his watch, not that he needs to.  He’s already been pushing his luck by staying as long as he has.  “Not long, I suppose.  You?”

“May have already,” Jim says, unconcerned, and Sherlock wonders if Jim makes a habit of slipping away during his class trips.  Jim smiles.  “It’s all right.  I got to meet you.  It’s been a successful excursion.”

Something in Sherlock relaxes.  “I agree.”

Jim turns his face away and upward, taking in the dim space around them and closing his eyes like he's committing the moment to memory.  Opening them again, he murmurs, "I'll see about sending you on a proper hunt or two."  He looks back to Sherlock.  "Any requests?"  
  
Sherlock shakes his head.  "Surprise me."  
  
"Love to."  Jim approaches, shoulders straight and eye contact unwavering, and extends his hand.  "Be seeing you, then, William Sherlock Scott Holmes."  
  
It makes Sherlock's breath pull in, because Jim says his name like he's practiced it, too.  
  
Swallowing hard, Sherlock clasps his hand, and it is not the firm one-pump handshake Mycroft once tried to teach him two years ago, because this is not a business agreement, but a promise.  
  
"I look forward to it," Sherlock says, "James Michael Moriarty."

Jim’s hand tightens minutely around his, and Sherlock squeezes back.  He will keep this moment, every detail.  He will keep the eerie, dim light, and the specific hues of the caution tape in the corner of his eye, torn down in three places, and the timbre of their voices echoing off of the walls.  He will keep Jim’s warm fingers around his cold ones.  He will keep Jim’s expression, disorienting in its combination of elated warmth and the glitter of broken glass.

As one, they let go, turn from each other, and part ways.  But they don’t.  Not really.

_Something_   _begins,_ Jim's story says.   _Something that matters._

Sherlock clutches the card in his pocket and smiles to himself as he steps out into the cool air, because he has so very much to look forward to.


	2. Fall 1994

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to all who left such kind comments and encouragement on Chapter One! I can make no promises about a regular posting schedule, but will do my best not to leave you hanging for too long in between chapters. Enjoy!
> 
> (There are a few references to musical works in this chapter, and I tried to set the links up to open in a new tab or window automatically, but AO3 is fighting me. I'll keep working on it, but for now, I recommend just right-clicking or tap-and-holding to open them in a new tab if you choose to do so.)

Their meetings are rare and exhilarating things, spikes of a beating heart on a monitor, bursts of color in a world of dull gray.  They happen once a year if they're lucky - twice in 1992 - and they never last longer than an afternoon or a night.  In between, the letters have to suffice.  

There is never a letter without a puzzle to lead Sherlock onto a delightful hunt, but over time, the messages paired with the puzzles have grown more substantial.  Sherlock has learned, from photographs and torn-out notebook pages and hidden messages embedded in codes with the red pen, that Jim can find gallows humor in the most innocuous of images; that he's often restless and contrary in school (not unlike Sherlock), and so busies himself with collecting secrets, and with them reluctant allies for when the time is right; and that, quite possibly, Sherlock is the only person he has to talk to.  

He once sent Sherlock a torn-out page from his science textbook with a simplistic chart of the Milky Way Galaxy, and over the top of it Jim had used his red pen to scrawl in enormous letters, _FUCKING RUBBISH_.  Included with the page was a sheet of lined notebook paper bearing a chart of Jim's own, far more complex, complete with mathematical formulas and notes scribbled in to indicate rotational patterns and changes likely to come in the next century or so.  It was not the careful, meticulous work of protractor and patience; the lines of orbit were each a single bold stroke, constellations dotted out in haste, the numbers sloppily scribbled.  It was not a work of science, but of passion.  Jim was angry when he did it, angry and restless and so full of buzzing, suffocating knowledge that his only choice was to open a vein and pour that knowledge onto a page as fast as he could.

And he sent that page to Sherlock, because he knew he would understand.

Sherlock keeps the page in a small box under his floorboards, along with the rest of Jim’s letters.  He relocated his old birthday card to the box after his first meeting with Jim; he didn’t need it under his pillow anymore, now that he’d met the real thing.

And the meetings matter.  It’s a funny thing, meeting so rarely, usually on quite short notice.  A letter will arrive, and it will be a photograph, or a clever turn of phrase hiding a set of coordinates, along with a date and time.  The thrill that hums through Sherlock’s bones when he receives such an invitation has never dulled.  (Nor has the disapproval in Mycroft’s scowls, which never fail to put an extra spring in Sherlock's step.)

They are slightly different people every time they step into the same space.  When they met for the second time, Jim’s face had lost a bit of its softness, and his eyes were a bit more off-putting for it, big and dark and startling.  At the third meeting, Jim had grown a respectable handful of inches - not nearly as many as Sherlock had, but it was at least noticeable - and at the fourth, his voice was abruptly _different_ , though its natural tone remained smooth and soft.

Their fifth and most recent meeting, a summer evening perfectly placed between Sherlock’s sixteenth birthday and Jim’s seventeenth, was different than the others.  That time, Jim had not changed overly much other than having grown a bit leaner, but he was quiet, distracted, the shadows under his eyes pronounced, his nails bitten down far enough that it looked like they had bled.  He was tense, as though expecting Sherlock to be disappointed with him for falling short of his own standard, for being a breathing, solid person who occasionally had bad days, bad weeks.  A ludicrous notion.

Sherlock opted to take the lead that evening, taking Jim by the sleeve and sneaking them both into a hidden corner of the Royal Albert Hall just in time for the London Philharmonic.  With the first chord of _O Fortuna_ [ _ 1_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXFSK0ogeg4), thundering from four hundred voices, Jim's face went slack and his breath caught, and Sherlock knew he had made the correct choice.  

He learned that night that Jim feels music with his whole body, his eyes often drifting shut, the subtleties of his expression constantly shifting, his breath quickening and slowing with the melody.  Now and then a perfect chord would make his lips curve up.  By _Swaz Hie Gat Umbe_ [ 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXBtaQAydS0), Jim was smiling widely and pulling him into a clumsy waltz in their hiding place, the both of them trying not to laugh at each collision as they both tried to lead.  When the performance ascended toward its culmination with _Ave Formosissima_ [ 3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlGc0sUtJlo&t=0m6s), it seemed to roll through Jim in waves, his eyes gleaming wet in the low light.  

Sherlock still does not remember which of them reached for the other’s hand; only that they held on tight until the final ringing note.  As they sat waiting for the audience to disperse so they could make their getaway, Jim pulled Sherlock’s hand to himself and bowed his forehead against it, holding it there with both hands, deep gratitude written in every curve of his face and line of his body.  It felt truly profound when Sherlock realized that all evening, they had barely exchanged a word.

Something shifted that night, and it has not shifted back.  Before, Sherlock would have called Jim his counterpart, his equal, the person he tried hardest to impress.  Jim is still all of those things, but now Sherlock’s mind no longer hesitates to call Jim his friend.

Today, Jim has chosen a rooftop in the city proper.  He seems partial to high places.  It's closed access, of course; Jim picked the first lock, Sherlock the second.  The rooftop itself isn't much, just chimneys and refuse from the last construction project, but it has an excellent view.

They sit around the corner from the door and share a cigarette, looking out over the city standing stark against a cloudy sky, and it is as peaceful as Sherlock has felt all year.

"Are you gonna go to university?" Jim asks, dropping his head back against the wall, his throat one long line.  His clothes are secondhand and ill-fitting, his jeans stylishly torn, his hair a gelled sculpture.  His eyes haven't changed.  They never do.  
  
Sherlock frowns, exhaling smoke, and passes his cigarette to him.  Attending university has never been a question in his household so much as an inevitability.  "Aren't you?"  
  
Jim shrugs, blowing out smoke in a stream.  "Seems dull.  Dull place full of dull people being groomed for a bunch of dull expectations."  He takes another deep drag.  "Could be fun with you, though.  Which one are you headed to?"  
  
"Cambridge, most likely."  
  
"Hmm."  Jim passes the cigarette back and rolls out his shoulders, taking a swig of the stolen beer he brought along.  "Doubt my grades would be up to par."  
  
A laughable notion, utterly laughable, and it cannot be anything but true.  "Really?"  
  
"It's boring.  I act out when I'm bored."  
  
Sherlock exhales another cloud and smiles.  "So do I."  
  
"It's nothing _appalling_ ," Jim says, accepting the cigarette again, his grin mischievous.  "Not the ones I've been caught for, anyway."  
  
While Jim smokes, Sherlock takes a drink of his own beer and thinks on it.  "I inform teachers when they're spreading stupidity.  Apparently that's frowned upon."  
  
"Then they should quit spreading it," Jim says, and Sherlock hums agreement.  "I don't correct them, exactly.  Ask them if they're certain, sometimes.  But mostly I just look at them."  He chuckles, low and rough.  "You'd be amazed how many detentions I've gotten for a look.  Apparently I make people uncomfortable."  
  
Sherlock can picture it.  Jim's eyes are dark and deep set, his poker face impenetrable, his body language incredibly expressive without breaking its subtlety.  He is unsettling, delightfully unsettling.  Sherlock thinks he'd like to take a class with Jim.  Between the two of them, they'd likely be expelled within the hour.  
  
It's an amusing notion, and Sherlock feels particularly cheerful as he takes the cigarette back.  "I chloroformed my lab partner once."  He takes a drag, then lets it out.  "Accidentally."  
  
Jim grins.  "Accidentally."  
  
"I can't be faulted for my actions when they insisted on putting all of the proper ingredients and an idiot in the same room with me."  
  
Jim salutes with his beer bottle.  "I may have snuck a hallucinogen into the pudding, once.  Just the once!" he insists when Sherlock coughs out a laugh.  "That was a fun day.  Got one of the lunch attendants sacked on my behalf.  Just as well.  Never liked how she looked at me."  
  
Sherlock takes a last drag and holds out the cigarette to Jim to finish off.  Jim shakes his head, taking a deep pull of his beer, and Sherlock shrugs and keeps it for himself.  "I got a janitor sacked once, but he was guilty of what he got sacked for."

"What'd you do?"

Not _what did he do_ , but _what did you do_.  Sherlock turns an appreciative smile in Jim's direction, and it is immediately understood, accepted, and quietly returned.  He is beginning to think he would do many terrible things to keep Jim Moriarty within reach.

"I located the cameras he'd hidden in the gym locker rooms and arranged for him to be caught quite red-handed in his 'monitoring' of them," he answers, thinking back while Jim lets out a quiet _Ooh_.  Mummy had nearly had the headmaster's head when she found out about the scandal; Mycroft had come home looking ill and hadn't left Sherlock alone for weeks.  Dad had simply put a hand on his shoulder and asked, _All right, son?_ and nodded when Sherlock assured him he was quite well.  Sherlock sucks the last breath from the cigarette, then flicks the butt away over the roof's edge.  "I didn't like the way he looked at me, either."

Jim lifts his bottle.  "Cheers."

"Cheers."

They both finish off their bottles and lean back.  It's their second bottle each, and not being one to drink much, Sherlock is starting to feel rather tingly and peculiar.  He's certain that Jim is a more seasoned drinker than he, but the rate of Jim’s blinking has slowed and his muscles have relaxed, as he is also rather petite in comparison.

(Improbably, Sherlock has managed to grow even taller in the last year, prompting Jim to greet him this afternoon with a blink and an impressed, _Jesus, look at you._ )

"Cambridge," Jim repeats after a moment, contemplative.

Sherlock nods.  "It shouldn't be too difficult to nudge things into order," he considers.  "They'll take you."

Jim nods.  It was never a question of whether he _could_ get in.  "I may let them."

He lifts his hand to cover a yawn, and Sherlock silently notes the fading purple bruising, four dark fingers and a thumb, circling Jim’s wrist as his too-big jacket sleeve falls back.  Jim lowers his hand, and his sleeve slips back into place.  The angle and coloration tell a story of a large hand around that wrist, a sharp impact with a wall or floor, and a prolonged, punishing grip.  A vicious struggle, and an overpowering.

Sherlock can’t help but glance toward the other wrist, but Jim is far too observant for him to get away with a second look.  He catches Sherlock’s eye en route, pointedly holds his gaze a moment, and then obligingly lifts his other arm, tugging the sleeve down to reveal another ghostly hand around his wrist.  “Matched set,” he says, his face inscrutable, and covers the bruises up again, reaching for a third bottle.  “It’s sorted.  Never mind it.”

Quietly, Sherlock asks, “Why does he hold you down?”

Jim drinks deep and lets the bottle dangle in his fingers.  “Because he’s frightened.”

“Are you?”

Abruptly, Jim smiles.  It is not a nice smile, and he aims it at nothing in particular.  “Nothing frightens me.  I said it’s sorted.”  He takes another swig.  “Just a bit longer, now.”

Sherlock catches the glimmer in Jim’s eye and follows it.  “Until you turn eighteen,” he says slowly.  Jim tilts his head encouragingly.  “Until you wouldn’t be placed in the system after.”

Jim nods and nurses his drink, his voice soft.  “Until he has an accident.”

It is mildly worrying, how alarmed Sherlock is not.  Most people would be alarmed, he thinks.  A brief inventory of his emotional state tells Sherlock that his primary emotion at the moment is curiosity.

“How will you do it?”

Jim playfully lifts a finger to his lips.  “I’ll get you the autopsy report after, and you tell me.”

Sherlock should not smile at that, but he does.

Jim sets the bottle down, and all at once he swings to his feet, managing the change in altitude with the grace of a cat despite the alcohol in his system.  “Let’s play a game.”

Sherlock squints at him.  "We play games all the time."

"Not in person.”  He stretches, spreading himself out, and looks around the roof.  Something catches his eye, and he brightens, crossing to it and swiping up a discarded metal pipe.  Grinning, he gives the pipe a few theatrical swings through the air and calls, “Do you swordfight?”

“Yes,” Sherlock says truthfully, amused.  He rocks to his feet as well.  “Do you?”

“I’m a quick study,” Jim says, picking up another pipe.  He tosses it, and Sherlock snatches it out of the air one-handed.  “And I’m afraid I fight a bit dirty.”

“Tut, tut,” Sherlock chides, giving his pipe a few experimental swipes, his form perfect.  He practices a trickier maneuver, flashy and impressive - to test the weight and balance of his weapon, of course - and Mycroft would scold him for showing off, but that’s what they do, he and Jim.  They perform for each other, and they appreciate one another’s performance.  “Swordfighting is meant to be a gentleman’s sport.”

“Who wants to be a gentleman?” Jim grins, standing still and indulgently watching Sherlock’s display, nodding in acknowledgement once he’s finished and beginning to circle slowly, one foot over the other.  “I think I’m more suited to the role of a ruffian.”

“Why not be both?” Sherlock counters, beginning to circle with him, sizing him up.  “If you can keep a secret,” he doesn’t miss how Jim’s eyes light up, the same way Sherlock imagines he himself lights up whenever he stumbles upon a new bit of information about Jim, and Sherlock fights a smile, “I’ve always had a penchant for pirates.”

His adversary crows a laugh.  “Oh, _yes!_  Now we’re talking.”

“However,” Sherlock is perhaps a bit overdramatic with the appraising once-over he gives Jim, head to foot to head, “I fear that without any proper teaching, you will be sorely outmatched.”

Jim huffs amusement and challenges, “So match me, O Captain, my Captain.”  He tosses his pipe from hand to hand, and Sherlock gets the idea.  “Nothing clever about muscle memory.  Show me what you can _do_.”

The grin Sherlock has been fighting finally wins out.  “Challenge accepted.”  He makes a show of lifting his pipe and passing it solemnly into his left hand, switching his stance to his nondominant side.  “A sufficient handicap, if you’re as quick a study as you claim.”

Jim smiles like a shark.  “Oh, I am.”  He mirrors Sherlock’s stance, only slightly loose-limbed from drink, preparing.  “D’you want to be the good guy, or the bad guy?”

Sherlock swings his pipe a few more times, getting used to the feel on his weaker side.  “That’s the appeal of pirates,” he answers.  “They are, by definition, both at once.”

Jim’s shark-smile shifts, just for a moment, the skin around his eyes crinkling.  Then he slips into character like a second skin and lifts his pipe-sword.  “Have at you, then, ye weevil-eating bilge-swiller!”

Sherlock barks a laugh that is only partly feigned - it’s possible the alcohol is to blame - and lifts his pipe as well.  “A black spot upon thee, rapscallion.”

Merriment twinkles behind Jim’s mask, and he lunges forward.

As it turns out, Jim was not exaggerating about being a quick study.  His eyes are sharp, observing Sherlock’s every move and turning them back on him with impressive form in opportune moments.  His footwork starts out sloppy, but he corrects it with each passing minute as he watches Sherlock, because this is a performance, too, for both of them.  It’s _clever_.  Jim is trying to impress him, just as Sherlock is trying to impress Jim.   _I’m still like you.  See, look what I can do._

Even if they’re near-adults behaving like utter children, running about the rooftop and shouting absurd insults and clanging their pretend swords together while desperately trying not to laugh and break character, that’s still what it comes back to.  They are proving themselves.

They’ve been at it for fifteen minutes when Sherlock manages to press Jim into a deadlock near the roof’s edge, pipe to pipe, face to face.  He will win this deadlock simply by virtue of being taller and heavier, which isn’t ideal, but as they push to overpower each other, he still commands, “Yield, scoundrel!”

“Ne’er, ye salty swab!” Jim strains back, and in a flash he’s lunged forward and a burst of unexpected pain jolts through Sherlock’s hand.  He hisses, stumbling back a step in surprise - a glance shows a curve of deep indents below his last finger, teeth, Jim just _bit_ him - and Jim lets out a, “Ha!” and leaps up onto the ledge on the roof’s perimeter.  When Sherlock shoots him a scandalized glare, Jim replies with a fierce grin, “I did warn you.”

He swipes the pipe down toward Sherlock’s head, and Sherlock blocks it, but doesn’t counter, eyeing Jim’s feet on the ledge.

“Landlubber, are ye?” Jim taunts, taking a purposeful step backward without looking.  “And here I thought ye had a _taste_ for danger.”

The ledge is not wide, it overlooks a four-story drop onto hard concrete in the middle of London, and they have both been drinking.  There are many perfectly sound reasons not to leap onto the ledge after Jim with a shout of, “Your doom be at hand, swine!” and they are all far better reasons than the utter delight that lights Jim up when he does.  Sherlock has never feared heights; he’ll simply need to trust the both of them to be as good as they claim, to be cleverer than the danger.

And oh, the adrenaline.  As he and Jim swap insults and herd each other back and forth along the ledge, as the wind whips at their clothes and the long drop below occasionally flits into his eyeline, Sherlock feels _awake_ , alight, as though he could fly.  He swipes low, and Jim fearlessly leaps to avoid it, landing perfectly back on the ledge, and maybe Jim could fly, too.  Surely, between the two of them, they could outwit gravity itself.

Even though they are still dueling, he has lost the game, broken character, the elation too strong for him to keep it off his face.  Jim catches it immediately, can’t miss it, but he doesn’t say anything, only looking terribly pleased with himself as he parries another blow.

“You two!  Stop right where you are!”

The voice is unfamiliar, louder than it should be, and Sherlock automatically follows it down, down, _down_ , and just glimpses a policeman on the ground with a megaphone before height vertigo hits him, and his foot slips.  He gasps, one hand shooting out to grab whatever it can - Jim’s jacket, _no don’t pull him with you what have I_ \- before Jim’s hands fist in his shirt and _tug_ , and they lurch off the ledge and back onto the roof, landing with a thud.

Sherlock’s back hits the roof, and he grunts as the air is knocked from his lungs.  It takes a moment for his breath to come back, and he looks over to find Jim lying next to him, his face and body contorted with silent, airless laughter.  He gasps in air, and then he’s cackling aloud, high-pitched and genuine, a sound Sherlock has never heard.  It’s a funny sound, and all at once the leftover adrenaline floods him, and then he’s laughing, too, a bit hysterical, his eyes squeezing shut.

Once he’s started, it’s hopeless to try and stop.  Even more so when Jim swats him and gasps, “Kill us, why don’t you!”

Sherlock blindly swats him back, laughing too hard to care if it lands.  “ _You_ went on the ledge!”

“Ah-ah, I didn’t _make_ you jump up after me!”

“You…” Sherlock tries to pull in a breath and realizes he has no argument, “...shut up.”

That only sets Jim off again, which gets Sherlock going again, to the detriment of his stomach and his facial muscles, _oh_ this hurts but it’s good, it feels good.  Jim presses his forehead to Sherlock’s shoulder, gasping, and they just lie there for a bit, laughing until the buzzing in their nerves subsides.

Or, at least, until Jim lifts his head like he’s heard something, and Sherlock catches the sound of footsteps ascending the stairs to the roof.  Abruptly he remembers that they only got up here because they each picked a lock.

He and Jim look at each other, then scramble to their feet, snickering, still holding their pipes, and rush to slouch down behind one of the chimneys, hidden from the door.  They go silent when the door opens - two adults, one male and one female, not police but building security based on the shoes and gait - though Jim is pressing his lips together like he still wants to laugh.  Sherlock elbows him, and Jim elbows him back, and they exchange a look that tells Sherlock everything he needs to know.

He waits for the right moment, then throws his pipe across the rooftop to clatter into the ledge.  The moment the security guards’ footsteps start toward it, as one he and Jim spring up and sprint for the door, Sherlock reaching it first and Jim throwing it shut behind them, blocking the guards’ shouts as they bolt down the stairs, hopping two and three steps to each landing.  

Jim lets out a joyful whoop as they burst out the main doors, and they keep running until they’ve long since lost the guards, and they’re not racing, exactly, but that hardly matters.  By the time they finally slow, they’re both panting too hard to get a word out and Sherlock has lost count of the blocks they’ve covered.

“Shit,” Jim laughs breathlessly, after they’ve spent a minute leaning on the side of a building in a back alley, gulping down air.  “Next go ‘round, I’m climbing on your fucking back.”

Sherlock makes a face, finally starting to get his breath.  “That hardly sounds like a,” breathe, “mutually beneficial arrangement.”

“Sure it is,” Jim says between huffs, dropping his head back against the wall and closing his eyes.  “You like it, having to run for your life a bit.  And you like a challenge.  I like not running.”  He lifts his hands, palms up, as though receiving revelation from the heavens.  “Symbiosis.”

Sherlock chuckles, which always seems to make Jim smile like he’s in on a secret, and they spend a minute or so more in companionable silence while their cardiovascular systems regain their equilibrium.

Once his body is no longer quite so focused on replenishing its oxygen stores, Sherlock takes the opportunity to consider their surroundings.  He has been slowly but surely adding to his mental map of London each time they’ve gone somewhere new, and the map is not complete yet, but they have certainly covered some ground.  “Will this complicate things for you?” he asks, noting the nearest intersection, just visible at the end of the alley.  “Getting back to your class?”

Jim shakes his head, unconcerned.  “Simplified it.  They’re putting us up five blocks that way.”  He nods westward.  “Not that I’m in any rush, but we did run in this direction for a reason.”

“How long do you have?”

Jim glances at the sun, barely detectable behind the cloud cover, and makes a face.  “Bit longer.  There’s a certain time-window before it escalates to anything as dramatic as Missing Persons report.  They’ll have noticed I’ve gone some time ago.”

The familiar pall of disappointment begins to work its way through Sherlock’s chest at the approach of their parting, even if they do still have some time.  It always makes him feel a bit heavier, a bit incomplete.  He has reflected on this feeling, its consistency, its depth, and the only conclusion he can reach is that it is not natural for Jim and himself to exist in their separate spheres, restless and alone.  They should be in the same space, feeling the benefit of each other, challenging each other, creating each other.   _Symbiosis_.

Next to him, Jim softly says, “Not going anywhere yet,” because he has noticed, he always notices.  Sherlock swallows the disappointment and nods.

Jim flips his pipe casually in his hand and pushes off the wall.  “Show me something, will you?”  He turns and holds the pipe out to Sherlock.  “That flashy bit you did on the roof, before we started.”

Sherlock grins and takes the pipe.  “Intrigued?”

“Very.”

Sherlock strides into the center of the alley, trying not to look too pleased with the attention.  He takes his stance, takes a breath, and demonstrates the move again, athletic and precise and all too aware of his audience of one.  Jim’s mouth has an upward curve as he takes it in, not simply watching but studying.  “You’re doing something with your weight distribution when you turn,” he murmurs, distracted, like he’s replaying it in his mind to work it out.

There is, of course, a more practical option available, and Sherlock seizes upon it.  He flips the pipe and holds it back out.  Jim shakes his head - unsurprising, as they are both performers, and generally prefer to demonstrate only the skills they have more or less perfected - and Sherlock steps closer to clarify.  

He takes Jim’s sleeve, carefully avoiding his purple-gray wrist, and places the pipe in his hand, closing Jim’s fingers around it in approximately the correct grip, allowing for the fact that the pipe is not a proper fencing foil.  Then he circles around behind Jim and adjusts his shoulders, and that’s when Jim relaxes, catching on that this is not a test, but a lesson.  He holds still and goes quiet while Sherlock angles his chest, encouraging a straighter spine, and while Sherlock drops his hands lower to adjust the position of his hips.  “You _are_ a quick study,” Sherlock mumbles, pressing on Jim’s leg until he moves it to the appropriate position, “but a strong foundation in the stance lends itself to skill beyond imitation.”

“Don’t sell imitation short,” Jim says quietly while Sherlock comes around to the front.  “You know what they say.”

Sherlock gives him a dry smile.  “I’m flattered.”  He steps in closer to adjust Jim’s arm, and Jim goes silent again.  Sherlock thinks little of it until he glimpses Jim’s face.

In four years and six meetings, Jim’s eyes have never changed.  Regardless of whether he is smiling or scowling, whether they are wide with wonder or narrowed in thought, there is an intensity to his gaze that shifts with his mood, but never truly fades.  Over time, Sherlock has grown accustomed to that intensity being focused solely in his direction, but it has never looked like this.  It has never been this focused, never across so few inches, and never aimed so unwaveringly at Sherlock’s mouth.

Very little deduction is needed to divine what Jim is thinking about at this moment.  Immediately something twists uncomfortably in Sherlock’s gut, and he accidentally meets Jim’s gaze for a split-second as he deliberately turns away to position his other arm.  In that split-second, he just catches the slight narrowing of the eyes that means Jim is observing, putting pieces together.  Deducing.

They’re silent while Sherlock perfects the angle, hating the tension creeping up his spine.  Logically, if Sherlock were to accept a kiss from anyone, it would make sense for it to be Jim - his friend, his confidant, not unpleasant to look at or touch, arguably the most interesting person in his life - but he does not want to be kissed today.  He cannot think of any day on which he has wanted that, much less any of the emotional tedium likely to come with it.

The return of Jim’s voice is abrupt enough to jar Sherlock out of his dithering.  “Thanks, Professor, but I think I can take it from here without further manhandling.”

Sherlock blinks at him, and the focused intent from a moment before is nowhere to be found in Jim’s gaze.  The glint of...whatever it is people turn into when they’re possessed by the desire for physical intimacy, is gone.  Jim, his friend, is giving him a pointed look and shooing him out of his personal space.  Allowing Sherlock to regain his own personal space.

It is as close as Jim could come to a polite apology for an imagined interaction, for a conversation made only of two glances and a moment of discomfort, and Sherlock takes a moment to process that, to be in awe of it, to be grateful for it.

He steps back and watches while Jim moves slowly through an approximation of the move Sherlock demonstrated.  Even buried in his oversized jacket, moving at unfamiliar angles, there is a grace to him that seems inborn.  Sherlock nearly loses track of their task completely, watching him.  He thinks of last year, of their joyfully uncoordinated waltz in the dark.

“Do you dance?” he finds himself asking.

Jim finishes the move and relaxes out of the stance in one fluid shift, lowering the pipe.  He cocks his head to the side with a faint smile.  “Yes,” he says slowly, and Sherlock files that information away, secretly delighted.  “Once upon a time.  Do you?”

Sherlock returns the smile, a bit cheekily.  “I’m a quick study.”

Jim’s smile grows.  “I believe you.”

And Sherlock relaxes, because they are back, the moment of awkwardness forgotten.  He has just started to consider whether asking for a demonstration would be untoward when a third, unfamiliar voice rings through the alleyway.

“There he is.  Oi!  Freak!”

Sherlock automatically stiffens, then immediately reprimands himself - just because a few particularly uninteresting classmates will call him nothing else, that hardly means he should be so conditioned to respond to it - but then notices that Jim has gone still, too.  His face shifts somewhere between distaste and resignation.

“Mine,” Jim mumbles.  “Fun’s over, I’m afraid.”  He sighs and turns toward the voice, smoothly hiding the pipe up his jacket sleeve as he’s turning, and Sherlock follows suit, keeping close at Jim’s shoulder.

There are two of them, both high-schoolers: the powerfully-built owner of the voice ( _aggressive, insecure, middle child, threatened by intelligence_ ), and a skinnier one eyeing Jim uncomfortably from the big one’s shadow ( _weak-willed, peanut allergy, concerned with reputation_ ).  Jim slips his hands into his pockets, unafraid, and coolly greets the big one, “Wallace.”  Then the smaller one, “Phillips.”

“Bloody happy with yourself, are you, freak?" Wallace spits, breaching the unspoken rules of polite standing-distance to tower over Jim, an uninspired attempt at physical intimidation.  Jim silently holds his gaze.  His face has changed entirely, shut down, gone smooth and motionless.  "Pull another vanishing act, get us all stuck hanging about the hotel while all the chaperones lose their heads looking for you?  You get off on fucking the rest of us over, do you?"  
  
"Oh, dear," Jim deadpans.  "You've caught me, ruining all the fun again.  Are you two the search party, then?"  He twists his mouth in distaste.  “I admit, I’m the tiniest bit insulted.”  
  
"You _say_ something, marble-mouth?" Wallace growls, and Sherlock frowns, because as insults go, that one is a bit odd.  "You think you're being _clever?_ "  
  
Wallace punctuates it with a shove to Jim's shoulders, and though Jim is perfectly capable of maintaining his balance, Sherlock's hand flies to his back to catch him anyway.  Jim's face flickers, like he's just remembered Sherlock is with him, but then it goes empty again.  He looks over Wallace's shoulder at the silent Phillips, who visibly swallows.  Interesting.  Phillips takes a tentative step toward them.  "Look, we found him.  Let's just take him back, let Professor Brown deal with him--"  
  
"No," Wallace says.  "I think marble-mouth's gonna get mugged.  Him and his pouf boyfriend."  It's the first time he has made eye contact with Sherlock, and Sherlock does not attempt to hide his disdain.  
  
"Don't look at him," Jim says, dark and possessive, more than Sherlock would expect, glowering up at Wallace.  Sherlock presses a bit more firmly against his spine, a reassurance of something he can't really name.  That he’s not frightened, perhaps.  That he’s here.

Jim quietly continues, "You should listen to Phillips.  He's very nearly growing a third brain cell as we speak."  
  
Wallace narrows his eyes and glares at his unhelpful ally.  "You gonna let him talk about you like that?"  
  
Phillips presses his mouth tight, and Sherlock wonders how long Jim has had him in his pocket, what secret Jim uncovered to make Phillips so frightened of him.  "I don't care.  Seriously, mate, it's not worth it.  Let's just take him and go."

“Oh, no need for that,” Jim dismisses.  “I’ll be along.”

Wallace growls, “Bloody right, you will,” and grabs Jim by the jacket and the shoulder, ripping him away from Sherlock with brute strength alone and throwing him hard to the ground.  Jim is quick, rolling out of kicking range and springing back to his feet, but Wallace intercepts him before he’s got his balance, grabbing his bruised wrist and yanking it behind him, forcing Jim back down with a knee in his back.  Pain flashes across Jim’s face, just a flicker of tight eyes and pursed lips, and that is quite enough.

Sherlock moves.  One sharp jab to Wallace’s elbow to loosen his grip, twist, pressure on the wrist and elbow joints to force him up and lock the arm, ignore the yelp and curse and defensive punch to the ribs.  The moment Jim is free, he is dropping his pipe out of his sleeve, winding up, and slamming it into his classmate’s knee joint with a promising _crack_ , making it buckle while the boy shouts.  Jim clamps around him like a serpent, one hand wrenching Wallace’s free arm behind his back, the other arm locking around his throat and cutting off his air.  Jim’s eyes are wild.  His nostrils flare.  Wallace gapes and struggles.

It would be unfortunate for Jim to choke his classmate to death over this - inelegant, passion-driven, public, witnessed - so Sherlock saves them both the trouble.  Aim, grip the wrist, clench teeth, close mouth, draw back like an impending sneeze-- _strike_.

Wallace drops.  Jim blinks at Sherlock only for a second, then releases his holds, letting his classmate hit the ground like an occupied body bag.

Phillips gapes his way through four unfinished vows before he shifts to flee, but Jim's arm flies out straight, blocking his path with the pipe, making him suck in a frightened breath as the metal presses to his chest.

"Phillips," Jim says very softly, his eyes fixed in middle distance, unfocused, in the general direction of the motionless Wallace.  "So sorry to hear about poor Wallace.  Getting mugged like that, right out on the street.  London can be quite a dangerous place, can't it?"

Phillips is painfully ordinary, but it seems he is not entirely stupid.  He swallows hard and nods.  "Yeah.  Yeah, awful dangerous.  Some...some stranger just up and mugging him like that."

"Mm.  How would you describe the villain?"  Jim's gaze slides up to Phillips's face like oil sliding along a surface.  The glint of wildness remains, predator-eyes.  Sherlock is transfixed.  "The better for us all to keep a weather eye."

Phillips takes an unsteady breath, the whirring of his simple mind nearly audible.  "Uh.  Big.  Taller than--"  His eyes dart to Sherlock, then away.  "Well, tall.  Blond, really blond hair.  Tattoos all down his arms."

"Too cold to see his arms," Jim sing-songs quietly, tapping Phillips in the sternum with the pipe on every other word, and Phillips grimaces.

"Right, right," he says hurriedly.  "On his hands, then.  He moved too fast, I-I couldn't see what they were."

"And he bloodied up poor Wallace because?"

"Uh, he, he...bumped him, walking.  The guy had a problem, and you know Wallace, how he is, he mouthed off, and...and he just dragged him off.  Off to this alley, and let him have it."

“Tragedy.”  Jim’s face cracks into an unsettling smile.  “Lucky you two found me before it happened.  Wouldn’t believe how lost I’d gotten, great big city and all.  This way I can look after him while you fuck off to get Professor Brown.”

Phillips hesitates, worrying down at Wallace, but Jim pointedly flicks the pipe up under his chin, and he flinches and blurts, “Yeah!  Yeah, we found you and then it happened.”

Jim doesn't prompt him again, just holding stony eye contact until Phillips starts to squirm.  Then he swipes the pipe out of Phillips's path with a flick of his wrist.  Phillips looks nervously between Jim and Sherlock for only a moment before taking the dismissal for what it is and scrambling off.

Jim watches him go, jaw set, eyes hard.  Once Phillips has rounded the corner out of sight, Jim slowly lowers his pipe to his side.  He inhales, long and deep, and exhales almost silently.  His cracks his neck on both sides.

Without turning around, he murmurs, taking the time to articulate each word, "You fucking head-butted him."

Sherlock silently wills Jim to turn around.  He's not giving him enough data about how to interact with him right now.

As though he’s heard him, Jim turns toward Sherlock, and things become clearer.  Jim’s face is incredulous, brow lowering and mouth curving up as they do when one has witnessed something absurd.  His voice slides up high, staggered with laughter.  “You fucking _head-butted_ him!”

He holds his arms out wide from his sides in a clear and deeply amused demand for information, and Sherlock relaxes - even as he marvels at Jim, changeable Jim who does not brawl, but who manipulates, who kills, who laughs, who dances - and shrugs.  “It’s quick and effective.  He was putting me off, so I solved the problem.”

“Don’t knock out your fucking brain cells!” Jim laughs, tossing down the pipe and stepping close, his fingers finding Sherlock’s temples after he’s tolerated Sherlock’s examination of his scraped palms.  “I happen to like them.”

Sherlock lets him touch, taking the liberty of warming up his hands in Jim’s jacket pockets, taking advantage of the ridiculous amount of body heat Jim consistently pumps out.  One hand brushes a pack of gum, the other Jim’s bottle opener.  Sherlock deftly closes his fingers around the latter.  "That's not how brain cells work."

"I don't care.  I like them where they are.  Mustn't waste them.”  Jim studies Sherlock's forehead, the fingers at his temples gently holding his head in place.  "You're going to have a spot."

Sherlock shrugs again.  "Not quite as noticeable as his."  Jim smiles wide, the corners of his eyes crinkling again, and Sherlock hates to chase it away, but he can’t help circling back to the piece that perplexed him.  “Why did he call you that name?”

The smile shrinks, though Jim doesn’t seem terribly bothered.  His hands drop to finger the collar of Sherlock’s jacket, examining the material.  “What, ‘marble-mouth?’  Not the hardest deduction to make.  Don’t exactly sound like a proper English boy, do I?”

Sherlock frowns.  “Of course not; you’re not English.  You’re Irish.  You sound Irish.”

“Mm.”  Jim idly flips the collar up, then smooths it back down.  “It’s just a device.  I give them plenty of reasons not to like me, but admitting most of them would be admitting that I’m better than them in one way or another.  This one just happens to be least likely to backfire on them, stood the test of time, and all that.  Old Faithful.”  He wrinkles his nose in a sniff.  “I did worry about it a bit, though.  With you.”

Sherlock’s face must betray his offense, because Jim rolls his eyes.  “Not _you_ , but when we were meeting for the first time.  I did consider putting on something else.”  He flips his voice into a new accent, startlingly British.  “Something a bit more palatable, perhaps.  Or a bit flashier--” he switches accents again, this one more startling than the last, “--I can do American, too, you know.”

“Stop that.”

Jim chuckles.  When he speaks again, it’s as himself.  “Obviously, I didn’t.  Gave you a bit more credit than the common rabble.”

“Quite right to,” Sherlock grumbles.  “I went to that pool to meet James Michael Moriarty.”  The full name rolls off his tongue easiest of all, because he has practiced it, and Jim’s gaze intensifies at the sound of it, his eyes bright.  “No one else.  Nothing about you disappointed me.”

Jim exhales a slightly overwhelmed laugh, his face flushed, exhilarated.  He pulls Sherlock's face toward his, and for a brief, wary moment Sherlock fears again that he may be attempting to kiss him, which would spoil the whole thing, but instead Jim only presses their foreheads together - gently, though Sherlock can still feel the point of impact throbbing between them - and closes his eyes.  "William Sherlock Scott Holmes," he breathes, more to himself than to Sherlock, savoring each syllable as though trying to taste them.

He doesn't elaborate, and Sherlock closes his eyes as well, because he understands.  This is what they do.  This is what they are.  Their minds go together, two hemispheres of one truly magnificent brain.

Jim's fingers slide an inch up into Sherlock's hair and curl in tight, holding him there, a flicker of desperation slipping in.  Phillips will be back soon with a bigger audience; they don't have long until they have to part ways again for...however long it will be this time.  Sherlock keeps his hands in Jim’s pockets and leans into him in turn.  Jim is warm despite the cool air, utterly real and alive, and they spend a moment just being in each other’s space, sharing heat and air and silence.  They have the same mix of cigarette smoke and alcohol on their breath.

Sherlock fists his hands in the lining of Jim’s pockets and whispers across the small space, "Come to university with me.”

Jim inhales deep and sudden, as though waking from a daze.  Then, slowly, he nods.  He pulls one hand away from Sherlock’s face and extends it in the small space between them.  “Cheers.”

Sherlock smiles, and they shake on it, though just like at their first meeting, it’s not a proper handshake so much as a brief clasping of hands.  “Cheers,” he dutifully replies.

There is a groan from the ground, and Jim frowns down at Wallace with distaste; he seems to be coming to.  Jim sighs, then steps back, letting go of Sherlock’s hand last. Cold air and dull gray fade back in, and Jim murmurs with reluctance, “Off you pop.”

Before leaving, Sherlock holds up the bottle opener he’s managed to lift from Jim’s pocket.  One more little move in their game.  “Would you like this back?”

Jim grins.  “Keep it.”  A flick of his wrist, and one of Sherlock’s cigarettes appears between his fingers, somehow pickpocketed right out of the pack.  “Do you mind?”

Oh, he’s good, so very good.  Sherlock almost wants to see how long he can get away with pretending to be one of Jim’s classmates, just to stay a bit longer, but ultimately he just nods in appreciation.  “Well earned.”  He picks Jim’s pipe up off the ground and holds it up, a silent promise to get rid of it, and Jim gratefully inclines his head.

Wallace’s eyes are starting to blink open, and Jim motions Sherlock away with a jerk of his chin.  They hold warm eye contact for a moment more, and then Sherlock turns on his heel and gets out of sight.

Out of sight, but not gone, not yet.  He can’t resist observing as Jim rolls his neck, closes his eyes, and _shifts_.  When his eyes open again, he is entirely in character, the picture of a blameless schoolboy.  He kneels next to Wallace and speaks calmly to him.  When Wallace recoils and spits abuse at him, Jim puts a comforting hand on his shoulder - subtly squeezing a rather painful pressure point, clever - and murmurs something else.

By the time Phillips returns with a stricken teacher on his heels, Wallace has gone quiet and still.  Jim corroborates the story of the big blond man with the hand-tattoos, audibly and convincingly shaken, and when the teacher looks to Wallace, he just nods in agreement.

Fascinating.  Truly fascinating.

Sherlock watches just a bit longer, until the teacher phones for an ambulance to handle Wallace’s kneecap and nose, and Jim slips off to the side to be forgotten for a bit, the way he likes it.  Then, with one last mental snapshot of the way Jim looks right now, gelled hair and ripped jeans and quiet, wicked confidence, Sherlock turns away and starts walking, idly tapping out their waltz against his leg.  He has an unlikely weapon to toss in the Thames.


	3. Winter 1995

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fifty minutes left of Sheriarty Day - have an update!

_October_

 

It is midnight at Cambridge, and the stars are falling.

It’s a bit too cold for the two of them to be out like this, but here they are, lying prone in the near-frozen grass, feet pointing in opposite directions, watching the sky quietly explode.  The top of Jim’s head shifts minutely against the top of Sherlock’s as he takes in the expanse.

“It’s all dust, you know,” he murmurs, further tangling his fingers with Sherlock’s next to their heads.  “Meteors.  Grains of sand, most of them, barely there at all.  Until they burn.  And humanity looks up and marvels at them, paints them, studies them.  Assigns them meaning, real _meaning_ , stories and superstitions that carry through generations.  Little bits of dust.  All they had to do was choose the right time and place to die.”

Sherlock has never had much reason to consider the heavens, concerned instead with uncovering all there is to be uncovered about what is immediately before him.  He has never quite seen the point of stars.  But Jim speaks of them as one would of a dear friend, of a savior.  To listen to him is to glimpse what his love looks like, complete and encompassing, quietly desperate, poetic.

So Sherlock watches the stars fall, and he listens to the smile in Jim’s breath, and he almost understands.

“Do you watch this every year?” he asks.

“I used to,” Jim says.  “Back in Ireland.  Once I was old enough to work out how to sneak out and in again without getting caught, I made a ritual of it.  Fancied it a little birthday present from the universe.”  His voice is shifting, so very subtle, wavering between the peace it settled into when they first lay down and the careful neutrality that closes around it on the rare occasion that he speaks of his home life.  “Then Mum left, and we moved across the water.  City lights, you know.  Choked all the life out of the sky.”  He tilts his head back a bit more against Sherlock’s, going silent for a moment, observing the meteoroid streams.  Quietly, absently, he adds, “I haven’t been able to see this properly since I was nine.”

Sherlock cannot imagine being kept from the things that comfort him for so long without losing his mind completely.  It is a primary reason for his asking Jim to join him at Cambridge.  However, it was for a far more specific reason that Sherlock researched the Cambridge area for the optimal location to view the Orionid meteor shower, and then insisted that Jim break the building curfew with him to do so.

“Fitting, then,” he murmurs, and Jim’s head tilts as if to try and look at him, study him.  He waits, and Sherlock explains, “I realized I’ve been remiss.  Five years ago, you sent me a truly generous birthday present.”  Jim exhales on a smile, and Sherlock says, “It occurred to me that I have never thought to return the favor.”

Jim turns his head and shifts their hands, holding the backs of Sherlock’s fingers briefly to his brow.  Sherlock squeezes his hand, because he can translate this, now.  Sincerity is difficult for Jim, not to feel, but to express.  He knows when something is too true to spin into a riddle or sharpen into a barb, and those are some of the rare occasions on which words escape him.  This gesture, bestowed on Sherlock only once before, when they were sixteen, is simply the shape of Jim’s gratitude.

“I’m aware that it’s a few days premature,” Sherlock whispers, but Jim shakes his head.

“It’s always a few days before,” he says, brushing his thumb over Sherlock’s knuckles.  “You did your research.”

“Obviously.”

“Don’t sound so offended,” Jim smiles.  “I’m well aware this isn’t your area.  Research, yes.  But not this.”

He could mean the skies stretched above them, or he could mean the elusive art of social etiquette - the remembering of a birthday, the initiative to provide an appropriate gift, the forethought to plan the gift-giving properly - and Sherlock supposes that either way, he would be right.  “It isn’t.  That doesn’t mean I’m entirely blind to its value.”

Jim brings Sherlock’s fingers briefly to his lips, appreciative, and then lowers their hands back to the side.  They are silent for a while, watching bits of space dust streak across the sky.

“You should skip your chemistry class on Tuesday,” Jim says after a bit.  “Sit in with me on the postgraduate seminar.  I heard this week’s topic is to do with--”

“Advanced mnemonic techniques,” Sherlock finishes, grinning.  “I was already planning on it.  Since it’s becoming statistically unlikely that the chemistry class will cover anything I don’t already know, I doubt a missed day will topple my academic performance.”

“Meet you there, then.”  Jim stretches, his head pressing a bit more into Sherlock’s as he arches his back, then settles back in.  “Doubt I’ll be missed in the programming class, considering I’m not entirely sure they’ve noticed I’m taking it yet.”

Sherlock rolls his eyes.  “Are you attending _any_ classes within your actual course of study?”

“Sure.”  Jim shrugs.  “When the mood strikes.  No harm in rounding out my learning experience.”

“You’re going to end up on academic probation.”

“I’m sensing very little hypothetical sympathy for that, and it wounds me,” Jim chuckles, and Sherlock hums agreement - he will not feel remotely sorry for Jim if he allows such a ludicrous, preventable setback.  “Anyway, it won’t happen.  That’s the beauty of cultivating a broad skill set.”

“And how will you manage to avoid it?”

“I’ve already told you.”

Sherlock frowns, thinks back, and blinks.  “Programming?”  He sits up at last, letting go of Jim’s hand and turning to look at him properly.  Jim smiles calmly up at him from his spot in the grass, and that confirms it.  “You’ve taken up _hacking._ ”

“Strategic data manipulation,” Jim corrects, brimming with false innocence, laughing again when Sherlock lifts an eyebrow at him.  He concedes to sitting up as well, taking his time, brushing blades of grass out of his hair.  “I’m still working out some of the finer details, but it’s only a matter of time.  The security on the electronic records in this place is laughable.  I’ve got plans for the records on James Michael Moriarty.  Among others.”

“Others?”  Sherlock pauses in pulling out a cigarette to squint at him.  “What are you planning?”

“Oh, this and that,” Jim dismisses, pulling out a lighter - Sherlock’s lighter, now that he’s looking, to which his empty pocket attests when he checks it - and flicking it to life.  Sherlock mentally awards Jim a point in their long-running game of thievery, then leans forward to light up, holding out out his hand until Jim smugly returns his steal.  “I’ll have a few friends to help me along.  Or they will, once they exist on paper.”

Pocketing the lighter, Sherlock takes a moment to ponder that while the cigarette warms him up.  “I trust you plan to elaborate on that eventually.”

“Eventually.  What about you?”

“What about me?”

“You’re bored.”  Jim shakes his head when Sherlock offers him a drag, instead leaning back on his hands, lifting his gaze back to the meteor shower.  “You’ve been bored since we got here."

“That’s not true.”

“It’s a bit true.”

“I’m not bored now.”

"You and your details," Jim sighs, his eye-roll dramatic.  "I'm not talking about right now.  I'm talking about your bulletin board."  
  
Ah.  
  
Sherlock shrugs.  "It's a hobby."  
  
"Violin's a hobby.  That corkboard is desperation."  Jim stretches out his legs and crosses them, not seeming to mind the cold, buried as he is in the same oversized jacket he's worn for years.  It’s fit him a bit better every time Sherlock has seen him.  "Anyone with that many newspaper clippings about dead strangers is either bored to tears, or they’re the one who offed them in the first place.  And considering that of the two of us, the latter isn't exactly your area, either..."  
  
"Speaking of which," Sherlock says pointedly, because last year Jim promised him an autopsy report to dissect, and as the months have passed, he has begun itching for it.  
  
"Give it time," Jim assures him, matching him thought for thought.  "'Yes, I've been eighteen for three hundred fifty-nine days, but I've only been out of the house two months.  University's my alibi.  It can't be too soon after I was with him.  Looks suspicious."  He looks back toward the sky.  "You'll get your puzzle."  
  
All logical points, and Sherlock sighs, flopping back down and shoving his free hand in his pocket in a futile attempt to warm it up.  He blows smoke directly upward and grudgingly admits, "I've solved every case on the corkboard.  They're rudimentary.  Sloppy.  Crimes of _passion_."  He wrinkles his nose in disgust, and Jim huffs a laugh and holds out a hand, beckoning.  Sherlock obliges, removing his hand from his pocket and allowing Jim to take it between both of his, to massage warmth into his fingers while he mutters about Sherlock's terrible circulation.  "I'd imagined tertiary education to at least provide a bit of a challenge, but it's no different than high school."  
  
"It wasn't designed for us," Jim says gently, pressing Sherlock's fingers between his unnaturally warm palms.  "I could have told you that."  
  
"You did tell me that."  He takes another drag and unhappily blows it out.  "I don't understand how you cope."  
  
"Same way I've always coped," Jim says with a shrug.  "I make my own fun.  Teach myself the things they won't teach me.  Herd the normals about, train them to do tricks.  Listen to you talk."  
  
"How is that coping?"  
  
"You're a real person."  Jim has taken to slowly, thoughtfully rubbing Sherlock's fingers between his, utilizing friction.  "The only one I know.  You can learn as many languages as you like, become as adept at conversing with the normals as if you were one of them, but there's a certain comfort to the cadence of one's native tongue."

Sherlock hums understanding, because ultimately, he supposes that's what kept him writing to Jim in the first place.  That innate, shared understanding, and with it the unconditional acceptance of all that he was, even the pieces of him that had been historically problematic.  Especially those.  "I've never mastered their language, I don't think."

"We could learn another one," Jim suggests.  Abruptly his speech changes, and it takes Sherlock a second to realize he is no longer speaking English.   _"High school provided German up to a point, and I filled in the blanks on my own, but I don't know that it agrees with me."_

 _"One wouldn't know it,"_ Sherlock replies, impressed, slipping into the language himself only a bit clumsily after a period of disuse.   _"I've been thinking of British Sign Language, actually."_

Jim's eyebrows twitch up.   _"I like it.  Shall we?"_

 _"Let's."_  Now that one of his hands is sufficiently warm, the other is beginning to voice its relative discomfort, so Sherlock pulls his hand away from Jim's, switches his cigarette to it, and holds out his neglected one.

Jim gives him a look, flipping back into English.  "Say please."

Sherlock signs a mournful _Please_ with his outstretched hand, and Jim snorts and takes it, proceeding to give it the same treatment as the first.  "I suppose if you're worried about your fluency with the normals, there's no better teacher than immersion."

Sherlock makes a face.  "Look around.  We're in a state of constant immersion."

"Really?"  Jim makes a show of looking about their chosen hill and up at the silent stars, listening to the songs of the few crickets that have not yet frozen.  "Because all I see is you, me, and Neverland."

Sherlock flicks his cigarette butt away and turns crossly onto his side, facing Jim’s hip, easing the angle on his arm.  "Other people are tedious."

"Endlessly," Jim agrees.  "But it's got to be deliberate immersion.  Interaction, not just observation."

"Interaction depletes energy stores that would be better utilized in the pursuit of practical knowledge."

" _Ooh_ , talk dirty to me."

"Oh, shut up."  He swats at Jim's leg, and Jim flicks his knuckle in retort.

"Don't be rude," he chides.  "I'm being nice to you."

"You made me say _please_."

"The _audacity,_ " Jim drawls, but he does go back to warming Sherlock's fingers.  "I suppose you could come with me to my regularly scheduled immersion.  I mean, soon I'll be immersed much more often, but I do have a regular appointment."

"Appointment?"

"Engagement, rather.  Session?"  He twists his mouth, dissatisfied.  "...Activity.  We'll call it an activity."

Sherlock lifts his head to better study Jim’s face.  “What sort of activity?”

Jim considers him for a moment, then smiles and shakes his head.  “Oh, you’re going to hate it.”

“Stop being cryptic.”

“Never.”  He clasps Sherlock’s hand between both of his, not massaging, just holding it for a moment.  “Do you trust me?”

“Of course,” Sherlock says, automatic, watching a series of emotions flicker across Jim’s face in response before it settles on warmth.  “Why will I hate it?”

“Because,” Jim murmurs, “it’s _expected_.  See, you’re already making the face.”

“I’m not making a face.”

“It’s your judgement face,” Jim says, grinning.  “Don’t worry.  You’ll hate it, but I’ll take care of you.  And it’ll get the job done.”

“The job of improving my ability to communicate with...them.”

“Precisely.”  Jim squeezes his hand, then returns it to him, lowering to his back next to Sherlock.  He takes a deep, contented breath, hands on his stomach and eyes on the stars.  “Never mind it, though.  We’ll work out the details another time.  And decide what you’re to wear.”

Sherlock blinks rapidly and frowns.  “What I’m to--”

“Thank you, Sherlock,” Jim interrupts, entirely solemn now, yet another of his damnably fascinating mood shifts that take the span of a blink.  He doesn’t look away from the sky.  “For this.”

He looks young when he says it, terribly young, like the day they met, and Sherlock sighs, because he won’t be getting that thread of conversation back until Jim decides it to be so.  Just as well, he supposes.  Stars have never much mattered to him, but this does.  This, everything about this, matters.

“Happy birthday,” he replies.  

Jim’s fingers link through his and squeeze, and they don’t let go for a long while.

-

Jim was right, of course, as he is right about most things.  Sherlock is bored.  Not bored with school, necessarily, as he is not so arrogant as to think there is _nothing_ he doesn’t know, and not bored with Jim, as he doubts such a thing is possible.

Sherlock is bored with _people._

He does not know what he expected from People, but for some inexplicable reason, he’s found that he did expect _something_.  A shift in focus, in habit, or, universe willing, in intellect.  Anything.  To his disappointment, his peers remain the same flawed, predictable creatures they have always been, motivated by basic biological urges and emotional requirements that Sherlock has never been able to understand.

Sherlock and boredom together create a dangerous chemical reaction, and he has not yet found a proper outlet.  He owns his textbooks now, so no one will lay eyes on his red-pen corrections except for himself and Jim, who can temporarily save him by striking up a debate about this or that note.  That, unfortunately, only lasts as long as Jim stays with him until he leaves for class, or goes to the computer lab to perfect his coding, or returns to his own floor for the uninterrupted time alone that they both still require.  Disappearing into experiments can distract Sherlock for exactly as long as it takes for him to confirm a hypothesis, and then he is left once again with only an itching under his skin and a mind that seems to be in a constant state of drawing breath to scream.

So began the bulletin board.

The board itself came to be as a result of Sherlock identifying a need.  While snipping unusual murders out of the newspaper has been a hobby - not a _desperate_ one, thank you - since he was young, and a bit of chaos in his work space has always helped him keep his mind tidy, he did in fact want to _use_ his desk on occasion.  Purchasing the bulletin board freed up a remarkable amount of space and made him blink at the newly empty surface of his desk, the color of which he had deleted ages ago.

It passes the time, solving murders, or at least hypothesizing.  Unfortunately, he does not have access to most of the information he would need to confirm many of his theories.  Less fortunately still, most of the time, he doesn’t need to.  The cases are easy.  

They’re _easy_.

The cases are easy, and his classes are easy, and the distractions aren’t enough, and it’s possible that Sherlock is going a bit mad, because the article and accompanying photo he has just cut out are not to do with murder at all.  More telling, he is - by his own free will - phoning his brother.

Mycroft answers on the third ring, and Sherlock greets him, “Daily Telegraph, Politics, Page Three, above the fold.”

“Sherlock.”  The grimacing smile in his brother’s voice tells him that Mycroft thinks he knows exactly why Sherlock has called.  “This is a surprise.  To what do I owe the tedium?”

“You’re slipping,” Sherlock says, studying the photograph.  The article is nothing terribly interesting, just a bit about the newest Cabinet member, but far more interesting is the photograph of the woman in action, and in the background, dressed primly in a well-tailored suit, is a figure both familiar and strange.  Familiar, because it is most certainly his brother.  Strange, because the last time Sherlock saw Mycroft - not terribly long ago - he had been much rounder.

“Twenty-four years of avoiding cameras,” Sherlock continues, “and here you are, darkening the doorstep of half the country.  Bit of an odd place for a ‘low-level government intern’ to pop up, wouldn’t you agree?”

He states Mycroft’s job title as a joke, because it is a joke.  Far more likely is that his brother is already in a position to have some unfortunate interns of his own, and far from low-level.

“I wouldn’t, actually.  But then, I wouldn’t expect you to be familiar with the nuances of these things.”  Sherlock presses his lips together, silently cursing Mycroft’s unfailing ability to make him feel as though he has decreased in age by half.  “Certainly you’ve not deigned to call me just to question my political aspirations.”

“No,”  Sherlock says.  “I’ve deigned to call you because you’ve decreased.”

The surprised silence on Mycroft’s end is truly delicious.  Sherlock can perfectly picture his eyes fluttering while his mind recalibrates.  “Pardon?”

“Decreased, brother dear,” Sherlock clips, hopping up from the desk to circle his flat, photograph in hand.  “In volume and mass alike, at a rate that’s truly impressive, considering that your work, play, and personal habits tend toward the entirely sedentary.”

Mycroft is slow to respond, still thrown, suspicious.  “...Thank you.”

“It’s not a compliment.  You’ve made a change, something drastic.  Why?”

“How interesting that you think that’s your business,” Mycroft says pleasantly.  “Surely I don’t need to point out how often you’ve seen fit to comment on--”

“Comment,” Sherlock emphasizes, frowning, “yes.  I never said you should _do_ anything about it.”

“How very comforting.  Really, Sherlock--”

"But someone did, didn't they?  New boss, maybe, but why should they care, half of them are twice your previous size to begin with--new flame, perhaps, I suppose miracles do happen--"  
  
"Good God, are you this bored already?"  
  
"Who says I'm bored?  It was in the newspaper."  
  
"In Politics, which you don't read unless you've exhausted the murder headlines, the obituaries, the Science and Technology section, and your daily crucifixion of the Opinions section prior.  Really, Sherlock."  
  
"Deflecting," Sherlock points out.  "Why are you deflecting?"  
  
"Why are you?"  There is a shuffle of paper, and Sherlock glares into the air.  If Mycroft has started multitasking, the conversation has a maximum of five minutes left to live.  "And whatever happened to your little friend?  Mr. Moriarty?"  Sherlock grits his teeth.  For some reason, it has never become entirely comfortable to hear either Jim or Mycroft utter the other's name.  "A rather short honeymoon period for the two of you, isn’t it?  Have you tired of him already?  Or is it that he's tired of you?"  
  
"Neither," Sherlock says coldly.  "But how interesting that you think that's your business."  
  
"Lovely.  Then perhaps you should consider taking your desperate deductions to him," Mycroft says.  "I know it comes as a shock to you, but I do in fact have work to do."  
  
That grates more than the rest, echoing with a host of younger Mycrofts telling him the same thing, when once he would have simply agreed to play.   _Not now, Sherlock.  I have work to do._  "Why bother answering the phone, if you're so terribly important?"  
  
"For confirmation that you are neither dead, nor dying, nor incarcerated, nor wallowing in your own personal Slough of Despond over how terribly disappointing life can be," Mycroft replies immediately, and Sherlock pauses in the center of the room, thrown.  "As you are currently none of those things, I am going to return to work, and you, I dearly hope, will proceed to find a way to entertain yourself.  Preferably by legal and sanitary means.  If there's nothing else?"  
  
It is not a question, and Sherlock rolls his eyes.  "See you at Christmas, then, brother mine.  I'll be sure to play through my entire repertoire of holiday songs for your pleasure."  
  
"You wouldn't dare."  
  
"Shall I begin with the one about the jolly snowman who suddenly began to melt?"  
  
" _Goodbye_ , Sherlock."  
  
The call ends with a click, and Sherlock mocks, " _Goodbye, Sherlock,_ " under his breath and returns the phone to its receiver.  He looks again at the photograph, then at the clock.  Jim won't be out of class for another half hour.  Groaning, Sherlock drops onto his bed, pulling the pillow over his head.

Entertain himself.  He is perfectly capable of entertaining himself.  He could review his bulletin board (again).  He could practice his BSL (alone).  He could read the required chapters for tomorrow's chemistry class (child's play).  He could smoke (monotonous).  He could throw himself out the bloody window (tempting, but ineffective from the first floor).

His brain is itching and his fingers are restless and his brother is shrinking and his friend is elsewhere and he needs something he needs something he needs _something_.

Throwing the pillow off his face (vaguely noting it impacting something that clatters to the floor), Sherlock takes a few deep breaths.  Last year he experimented a bit with caffeine pills as a means to pull him out of this particular sort of spiral, but it was only about thirty percent of the time that it was of any help; most often it just made him worse, _more_ jittery, _more_ restless.  When the effect was good, it was quite good, but he is not entirely certain he would not make regrettable choices if such a gamble were to backfire now.  

He abandons the fleeting thought of going to the medicine cabinet, and instead rolls off his bed and opens his violin case.  It is an imperfect solution, but it will do for now.

His brain is preparing to scream, so he closes his eyes and allows the strings to scream on its behalf.  Gone are the days of obediently regurgitating practice drills and repeating the works of the old masters; this is his flat, his violin, and his madness, and he will let it wail through him as it will.

Blessedly, he loses track of time, pouring his frustration into the strings, ignoring the rules of time signature and chord progression and simply letting it be what it is, simply being what he is.  He explores the range of sounds he can draw from his instrument, just as he has always explored the depth of potential he can draw from himself.  He is his own instrument.  He is beholden to no one else, dependent on no one else.  He can cope.

He can cope.

He does not plan a particular arc or ending, but in time, he draws the bow across the strings and feels, intrinsically, that it is done.  He holds out the note, allowing it to sing even as it dies.  At last, he lets it go.

The silence feels solid as it descends, and it takes a moment for Sherlock to notice that it is not, in fact, silence.  Rather, it is the soft scratch of pen to paper, and he is not the one doing it.

Opening his eyes, Sherlock blinks rapidly at the sight of Jim sitting cross-legged on his bed, leaning against the pillow he must have retrieved from the floor, a textbook and notebook abandoned by his feet and a stack of Sherlock's discarded newspaper clippings resting on his leg.  He is writing something on the top one.  Without looking up from the clipping, he murmurs, "Done already?"

Sherlock closes his mouth.  "How long have you been there?"

Jim glances up at him, amused, and looks at the clock.  "Thirty-seven minutes, give or take.  You seemed like you were chasing something, so I didn't interrupt."

Sherlock spares a moment to be mildly concerned that he didn't even notice Jim picking the lock - something they made a game of as soon as they'd moved in - before letting it go, muttering, “Unfortunately, my brother tends to have that effect.”

Jim’s eyebrows twitch up.  “He phoned you.  Wait, no--you phoned him, didn’t you?”  He writes out something else on the clipping.  “Is it because he’s shrinking?  Sloppy, for him, getting caught in that photo.”

Sherlock blinks at him.  "You're still keeping tabs on him?"

"Mm-hm."  Jim finishes whatever he is writing and sets the clipping aside, unconcerned, and then frowns.  "Wait, you were reading Politics?"

"What for?" Sherlock asks.  "What do you gain from watching him now?"

"He's interesting."

"No, he's not."

"Not to you.  He's your brother, of course he's not."  He pauses a moment to look over the next clipping, then takes his pen to it as well.  "But he's clever.  That brain of his, Jesus.  It's a monster.  I want to see what he does with it."

Betrayal spikes through Sherlock's chest, and he sourly replies, "If you'd like his number and ring size, I'll gladly provide."

"Lord, don't insult me."  Jim prods him with his foot.  "Obviously, I like your brain best.  Doesn't mean I can't be curious about other ones."  Sherlock rolls his eyes, stepping out of prodding-range, and Jim gives an exaggerated sigh.  "If you ask me, I'll stop watching him.  On the condition that he stop watching me."

That breaks Sherlock out of his sulk, and he frowns back at Jim.  "He's been watching you?"

"For ages," Jim confirms.  "He knows I know about him, just like I know he knows about me.  I suppose we're at a bit of an impasse."

Bewildered, Sherlock repeats, “What _for?_ ”

Jim waves a dismissive hand.  “Because we both love you very much, dear.  Interrogate me later, I’m busy.”

Sherlock very nearly pushes back for more information (opting not to touch the rest of the sentence), but he has never been anything if not a slave to his own curiosity.  Giving up, he puts his violin away and crosses the room to look over Jim's shoulder.  "What are you doing?"

Jim gives a noncommittal hum, and Sherlock looks closer.

These are the clippings that Sherlock has simply not cared enough to throw away yet, the ones he’s solved and disdained and removed from his bulletin board in favor of newer, minutely more challenging mysteries.  He’s scribbled them with notes, deductions, and verbal abuse.  Underneath them, Jim seems to be adding some notes of his own.  This clipping is a rather boring one, detailing the story of a shop worker found throttled to death.  (Half-brother, crime of passion, upset over the outcome of their father’s will.  Obvious, _obvious_.)  Beneath Sherlock’s comments in the margins, Jim seems to have been brainstorming.  There is a list of locations - come to think of it, none of them would have been bad places to make a corpse disappear, rather than a shallow grave in an obvious location - and a few assorted chemicals Sherlock recognizes from their use in some of the more refined crime scenes he’s read about, and... _oh_.

Understanding dawns, and Sherlock’s mouth falls back open slightly.  “...You’re _fixing_ them.”

Jim glances back at him, then shrugs, turning back to the pile.  “Passes the time.  You were right, most of them are just _sloppy_.  The one with the bludgeoning?  So fucking obvious.  Heat of the moment or not, at least have some self-respect.”

Sherlock snatches up one of the clippings Jim has already set aside and spins on his heel, pacing back across the room while he looks it over.  Underneath each note Sherlock has scrawled, there is now a follow-up note in Jim’s jagged, swooping hand, providing a solution or three to the error that Sherlock has highlighted.   _Clever_ solutions, sparklingly unexpected, with just enough of Jim’s dark humor behind them to be recognizable.

“To your liking?” Jim asks from the bed, sounding amused, and Sherlock realizes he has stopped in the middle of the room, grinning madly at a slip of newspaper.  When he looks back, he finds Jim looking awfully pleased, wearing the peculiar smile that only ever seems to make an appearance when he has made Sherlock smile first.  “Not much to work with on that one, since it was a bit uninspired to begin with, but one makes do.”

Perching next to Jim on the mattress, Sherlock looks over his shoulder at the growing pile.  “How many have you done?”

“Haven’t really been counting.  Eight?  Seven, nine, I don’t know.  It’s surprisingly meditative.”

Sherlock grins.  “Murder as meditation.”

“Why not?” Jim chuckles.  “It’s building puzzles.  Proper ones.  I’ve always built puzzles.  Just like you’ve--”

“Always solved them,” Sherlock finishes, working to keep his face under control, because this is _exciting_ , an entirely new game that they can play together.  “May I?”

Jim gestures vaguely to the affirmative, engrossed in writing out his suggestions for their throttler, and Sherlock begins to go through the pile, leaning on one hand behind Jim’s back.  Jim’s solutions are as strategic and meticulous as he is, his brilliance glimmering under the surface of every step.  Sherlock has never been naturally vocal with his praise, but even he has to pause here and there to note the elegance of strategy, or chuckle at a plot twist that Jim surely put in just because he thought it was funny, or breathe a soft _oh_ at a particularly ingenious detail.

“If you like,” Jim murmurs after a bit, leaning comfortably back against Sherlock’s arm, “I could build you some more.  I do love to spin a tale.”  He looks at Sherlock, eyes dancing.  “What do you say?  I’ll tell you the end of a _harrowing_ murder mystery,” he smiles, “and you tell me the beginning.”

It is the perfect game, the boredom cure that the clippings themselves had failed to be, and in a rush of fondness, Sherlock pulls Jim in and plants a kiss on top of his head, making Jim let out a laugh, surprised and pleased.  “You are,” Sherlock murmurs, “magnificent.”

Jim chuckles, “Are you talking to me, or my brain?”

“Irrelevant.  We are our brains.  Everything else is just transport.”

“Such a _romantic_.”

“When do we begin?”

“When I say so,” Jim says, bumping Sherlock with his shoulder.  “Play us something else, will you?  It was helping me concentrate,” he adds with a false pout when Sherlock opens his mouth.

Huffing a sigh, Sherlock sets the pile of clippings back down and crosses the room to retrieve his violin again.  “Any requests?”

Jim shakes his head, eyes back on his current project.  “Whatever’s in you, Mr. Holmes.”

Sherlock draws the bow across the strings, and the melody that pours out of him this time is vibrant, fast-paced and skillful, keeping pace with the possibilities now firing in his brain.  When he glances up for a moment, he sees that Jim was perhaps not being entirely truthful: his pen has stopped moving, and he has dropped his head back against the wall, just listening, his eyes closed, the utmost contentment in his breath.

-

Two weeks later, Jim “audits” one of Sherlock’s classes, to Sherlock’s amusement.  It’s one of many small infractions that he always seems to get away with, and that always makes Sherlock fight a laugh.  Jim never informs him ahead of time, and so will simply be there, inexplicably right next to Sherlock’s usual seat no matter the class or classroom, as though he has always been there.  Because he doesn’t want to be noticed, no one quite notices him, and therefore no one notices Sherlock next to him, which is, among other things, a relief.

As usual, they are chatting while the professor drones, tapping Morse Code into each other’s legs under their desks.  Today’s game is for Sherlock to make a deduction about one of their classmates, and for Jim to take the deduction and make up an explanation for it.  His explanations have been growing increasingly ridiculous.  Sherlock strongly suspects that by now Jim is just trying to make him laugh.

 _Red hair, blue shirt_ , Sherlock taps into Jim’s jeans, and Jim follows his gaze to the classmate in question.   _Trace of white paint on left wrist, been there at least ten hours, got it yesterday evening.  Dirt on shoes, was off campus recently, outskirts of neighborhood._

 _Clown brothel_ , Jim immediately taps back against his knee, and Sherlock fights a snort.  When he moves to chide Jim to be serious, his hand runs into a slip of paper instead.  He glances at Jim, but he is watching the professor, feigning deep interest.

Sherlock takes the paper from Jim and unfolds it under his desk.  Reads.  Realizes.

Jim has outdone himself, as always.  In Sherlock’s hand is no simple story, but a near-flawless imitation of an article clipped from a newspaper, in the proper font and format, complete with an altered photograph.  The article details a mysterious death, with just enough detail to give Sherlock something to work with.  On the back of the article is part of a false autopsy report - as though it had been torn in two, and Sherlock has access only to the piece that matches the size of the article - giving just a bit more of a clue while still keeping potentially vital information out of his reach.  Sherlock’s eye goes immediately to the words that have been cut off in the middle, his mind automatically trying to finish the sentences.

Jim’s fingers find his knee again and tap, _Your move._

Biting back a grin, Sherlock catches Jim’s hand and briefly squeezes it in thanks, then lets him go and spends the rest of class filling his notebook with notable details and information webs while Jim watches him work, neither of them tapping another word.

-

_November_

 

From primary school, through secondary school, to university, three things about Sherlock’s schoolmates have never changed.  First, they are boring; second, they find his observations equal parts amusing and repellent; and third, they wrongly assume that possessing a natural talent and a strong intellect means he does not _work_.  This latter has always bewildered him, because it could not be farther from the truth.

Sherlock’s mind is a powerful hard drive, but it is wasted without the work.  The work is everything.  Without it, there is no point to him, and therefore no point to anything at all.

So he works.  He reads voraciously, he experiments thoroughly, and he observes with every breath.  He studies his subjects of choice in depth, picking out the information that is of use to him and discarding the rest.  He invests his time, his energy, and his limited funds into the relentless pursuit of knowledge to fill his hard drive, sometimes to the detriment of his personal health, or to his reputation among those peers who look at his work and call it merely a hobby, an eccentricity.  He has even been accused of using his work as a shield against the world, an excuse not to expose himself to the vulnerability of caring for others.  Sherlock is quite practiced now at simply lowering his head to his work and shutting out their drivel.

Jim is the same, though perhaps with more immediately practical goals than Sherlock.  He puts in the work as well.  His interests are eclectic - now astronomy, now computer coding, now acting, now behavioral psychology - but he pursues each of them with a singleminded fervor that is fascinating to witness.  He’s begun to get headaches from the hours he puts in at the computer, hardly blinking, practicing.  (Sherlock has learned to notice the signs and ease Jim away from the screen, knowing he’s been successful when Jim groans and presses his strained eyes into the crook of Sherlock’s neck.)  He’s started teaching himself the languages of business and politics and law, filling up the corresponding sections of the newspaper with scribbled notes, diagrams, and hypothetical solutions.  He utilizes his acting techniques for the purpose of testing out psychological theories on unsuspecting classmates.

Whereas Sherlock utilizes knowledge in order to understand, Jim uses it to _do._  Likewise, just as Sherlock refers to the work as _updating the hard drive_ , Jim simply calls it _feeding the beast_.

Sherlock questions it one afternoon as they practice their signing on the way to lunch, working, always working.  Squinting against the reflection of the sun against the snow, Sherlock signs, _Why do you call it a beast?_

Jim watches his hands, blinks, and catches up.  He begins to sign back, _Why do you call yours a…_  He frowns, searching, then makes a face and spells it out, ... _h-a-r-d d-r-i-v-e?  Because that’s what it is._  The last half is quick and distracted, and he immediately reaches for the pocket BSL dictionary in his coat pocket, his steps slowing.  He won’t be able to focus again until he’s corrected the word, and Sherlock touches his wrist to stop him, showing him the correct sign.  Jim watches him, then copies the motion a few times, silently committing it to memory.  Resuming their original pace, Jim continues, _I feed the beast so it won’t get cross.  It’s unpleasant, when the beast is cross._

The curiosity is too much to take, and Sherlock lapses back into speech.  “What happens?”

Jim takes a moment, looking at nothing, absently sidestepping an icy patch.  “It takes over,” he says quietly, slowly.  He halfheartedly signs along, still practicing.  “Not completely. I’m not gone, when it happens.  It’s more the opposite.  I’m too...too _here_.  Too fast.  And the turning of the world is too slow.”  He pauses, signing through the last sentence again without repeating it aloud, swapping out _turning_ for _patterns,_ _world_ for _universe_ , _slow_ for _predictable_.  He makes a face, shakes his head.  “I go mad, for a while.  Not forever.  But for a while.”

They’ve reached the University Centre, and Jim holds the door open, following Sherlock in.  “So I feed it distractions.  Things it can use, things it has to work to digest.  Keeps the beast at bay.”

Sherlock thinks of the ever-changing condition of Jim’s fingernails.  The careful trimming and ragged cuticles when they were boys, the torn and jagged edges when they were sixteen.  The smooth, barely-touched curve to them these last few months, undoubtedly an effect of getting away from his childhood home.  All, perhaps, signs of how well or poorly he has managed to appease the beast in his brain.

They have dished up, sat down, and shrugged off their coats before Jim speaks again, his voice tentative and low.  “Does that ever happen to you?” he asks.  He looks Sherlock in the eye while he does, which is a bit rare, when it comes to topics closely related to Jim himself.  “Do you ever go mad?”

“I suppose that depends on who you ask.”  Sherlock has certainly been accused of madness before, when he’s been swept up in the throes of boredom or the rapture of a successful experiment, but the accusations were never made by anyone that mattered.  Mycroft always shot down the notion whenever Sherlock wondered aloud if he was indeed mad, dryly assuring him that no, he is simply incredibly melodramatic.  “And how you define madness.”

“How do you?”

Sherlock considers.  “I don’t, really.”  Jim tilts his head, watching his eyes like he’s trying to see through them, and Sherlock elaborates.  “I believe the term is overly broad, and its meaning changes with human understanding of what madness is not.  It’s a term useful to dull people.  An excuse not to truly observe, an excuse not to think.  Only to dismiss that which is unfamiliar.”  He can’t place what exactly is shifting in Jim’s expression, only that it is indeed shifting.  “At least, whenever someone has called me mad, that has been their purpose in doing it.  Dismissing me.”

Jim is watching him with quiet astonishment, as though he has stumbled upon something unexpected, something unique.  “Rude of them,” he murmurs.  “So it never malfunctions.  That lovely hard drive of yours.  It never turns on you?”

Sherlock lowers his eyes to his tray.  “I didn’t say that.”

“Tell me.”

He hesitates, not for lack of trust or courage, but for lack of words.  He has never truly attempted to explain the sensation aloud, as much as he has examined it after the fact of it.  More students have begun streaming into the dining hall after their midday classes, and Sherlock glances up as the noise level continues to rise.  This is not a topic about which he wants to shout.

Tentatively, he lifts his hands and begins to sign.

 _My hard drive sometimes…_  He does not know the sign, so he spells out, _o-v-e-r-h-e-a-t-s._ Jim nods, and Sherlock continues, _It happens when I don’t have work.  When I’m bored, I will do too much, and then it will be too much.  When it’s too much, I stop.  When I’ve stopped, I have trouble starting again._

Jim slowly signs back, _How much trouble?_

Another word Sherlock knows, but does not know.  He spells, _P-a-r-a-l-y-s-i-s._

Paralysis, because days have passed, before, with him barely able to drag himself from his bed enough to see to his body’s needs, much less something so daunting as changing his clothes or turning on the light.  Paralysis, because he has not yet worked out how to pull himself from that state.  Eventually, his mind recalibrates, and he remembers how to find purpose in the passing days, but that recalibration is not under his control.

 _Does it frighten you?_ Jim asks, and Sherlock answers truthfully.

_Yes._

_How do you start again after you’ve stopped?_

Sherlock shrugs.   _Time.  Or, sometimes,_ the corner of his mouth twitches up, because this is true, too, _a letter._

Jim smiles, just a little, and signs back, _The beast likes you, too._

Sherlock rolls his eyes, and Jim looks satisfied, picking up a fork and starting on his meal.  Sherlock abruptly remembers the tray in front of him and follows suit.  Jim has proven better than Sherlock at maintaining at least a semi-regular eating schedule - likely in no small part due to his appetite, which is unexpectedly formidable for someone his size - though they tend to be equally bad influences on each other’s sleep schedules.  They have sat up for entire nights, Sherlock at the desk in his dorm, Jim sprawled on the bed, debating on a growing list of disagreements, including but not limited to: the scholarly study of philosophy (Sherlock cannot fathom the point of arguing for centuries over a question without an answer; Jim breathes in the ambiguity like oxygen), the usefulness of the Mind Palace technique they learned about at the postgraduate seminar (Jim was skeptical; Sherlock was inspired), and the merit of pop music (Sherlock has deleted every pop song he’s had the misfortune to encounter; Jim, to Sherlock’s dismay, enjoys bobbing his head to it while he’s coding, singing along under his breath).  

They have just as often lost track of time from simply being in the same room, reading or typing or writing, not exchanging a word.  Sherlock is not sure what keeps Jim up on those nights; he knows only that something about that deliberate, shared silence is immensely comforting, and at times he has fought sleep himself for the sole purpose of hanging on to it for a bit longer.

Jim, true to form, is halfway through his main dish before Sherlock has finished his soup, and Sherlock is considering teasing him about it when he is interrupted by a very quick, very strange series of events.

First, a girl Sherlock has never seen ( _Nursing major, tennis player, currently sexually intrigued_ ) slows down as she passes their table, smiling shyly and making direct eye contact with Jim.

Second, she skims her fingertips against Jim’s shoulder in passing and greets him with a coy, “Hey, Alan.”

Third, Jim _shifts_ , immediately and seamlessly, becoming someone else.  He smiles slyly back at her, catching her hand and dropping a light kiss to the back of it, making her fight a flustered grin.  “See you tonight, gorgeous.”

Sherlock stares.

Jim lets go of her hand, and Gorgeous continues on her way, flanked by friends who are trying very hard not to be obvious about sizing him up as they pass.  Jim - whoever he is at the moment - winks at one of them as she tries to sneak a glance, then picks up his water and takes a sip.  When he turns back around and gets a look at Sherlock, he very nearly spits it out.

“Jesus,” he laughs, once he’s managed to swallow without incident.  “Your face!  You look like you’ve witnessed something _obscene._ ”

“Explain.”

Jim gets his breath, flushed with mirth, and picks up his fork again.  “Be a bit more specific?”

Questions, so many questions to ask about the last ten seconds, each as pertinent as the last.  A moment, and he settles on, “Who is Alan?”

Jim hums around a bite of potato, not bothering to finish before answering, “Alan, since you asked nicely, is a rather ambitious Economics student who tutors on Tuesdays, dazzles his Business Management professor on Thursdays, and gave the lovely Dhyana,” he nods in the direction the girl went, “an _excellent_ orgasm last Friday.  Next?”

Sherlock blinks rapidly, trying and failing to process the data.  It’s not enough.  “In what context?”

“You remember when I told you about my regularly scheduled immersion?”

Sherlock frowns.  “Your ‘activity.’”

“Mm.”  He finds the etiquette to finish his bite this time.  “I’ve started utilizing it as a bit of a test bed.  I can see which characters work, and which don’t.  Alan is proving to be quite the successful little charmer.  I’m growing rather fond of him, actually.  He’s such a _good_ boy.  It’s funny.”

“Test bed,” Sherlock echoes, mind racing to keep up.  “Testing for what?  What will you use him for?”

Jim shrugs, popping a grape into his mouth.  “Whatever he can get me.  Same with the others, though they’re a bit farther back in the testing stage.  They all have to complement each other, you know, keep things properly balanced.”  He grins, affecting an American accent, playfully over-the-top.  “That’s how you get the most bang for your buck.”

Sherlock is not very familiar with the expression, but of greater interest is that Jim is terribly cheerful all of a sudden.  It’s another of his rapid 180-degree turns of mood, fascinating, if whiplash-inducing, and after studying him for a moment, it dawns on Sherlock that the emotion he’s witnessing is pride.  Jim is trying something new, something strategic and clever, and he’s beginning to see success.  And it’s not the success itself, but the sharing of it, that is lighting him up so completely.

It’s contagious, the way Jim’s enthusiasm is always contagious, and the accompanying desire to grin back at him clashes with Sherlock’s current state of frustration.  Well, confusion.  He’s never been quite sure of the difference between the two.  “And the _bang_ would be...sex.”

Jim shrugs.  “Sometimes.”

“What for?”

Jim looks at him strangely, and it occurs to Sherlock that this may be one of those things that so much of the world intuitively, biologically _knows_ , unspoken and accepted without question, and that he alone cannot grasp.  He is strongly reminded of the boys’ locker room in high school, when his classmates would loudly fantasize about the women they wanted to kiss, to touch, to undress, while he focused intently on his own locker and shut down any attempt they made to rope him into the conversation.  It is not a nice reminder, and he hunches over his tray, seeing to his forgotten meal.  “Never mind.”

“Do you ever want to?”  Jim asks, then clarifies, “Have sex.”

It’s too blunt, too straightforward, and Sherlock runs through several possible reactions before deciding on the sardonic, dryly retorting, “Are you asking, or offering?”

Jim only looks at him, taking another sip of water, holding his gaze.

Sherlock huffs a sigh, breaking the gaze himself.  His potato is a welcome, if boring, respite.  “No.”

“Have you ever?”

“Wanted to, or engaged in the act?  Do be specific, Jim.”

It’s more snappish than he wanted it to be, but Jim is unfazed, his voice calm and sharply interested.  “Either.  Both.”

“No.”

“You’re very uncomfortable.”

“An astounding deduction.”

“Does sex frighten you?”

Sherlock snaps his head up, having had quite enough of this surprise interrogation.  “What are you doing?”

“The usual.”  Meaning observing, digging, carefully poking through Sherlock’s hard drive, testing how far he can get before hitting a firewall.  The same thing Sherlock does to him when he sees how close he can come to the beast before Jim slams its cage shut.  “Am I pissing you off?”

“Slightly,” Sherlock says, voice tight.

“Hm.”  Jim studies him a moment longer, his focus as intense as always, and then nods a bit.  “Okay.  All done.”

And apparently it truly is, because Jim drops his attention back to his dessert without another word on the matter, leaving Sherlock stewing in his seat.  He does not know what that means.  It’s not unlike a year ago, the kiss that never happened, the conversation without words.  Jim reacted similarly then, stepping back immediately and moving on without missing a beat.  He has not so much as looked at Sherlock’s mouth since they started university; this is the first time they’ve talked frankly about anything remotely related.  Because he won’t be able to stand not knowing, Sherlock quietly asks, “Have I disappointed you?”

Jim abruptly laughs.  The smile he gives Sherlock is not necessarily kind - it's a skill that eludes them both, really, the ability to be kind and mean it - but it’s a fond smile, a real one.  “You’d have to get a lot less interesting to achieve that.”

It's not an apology, as an apology isn't called for to begin with, but it's an olive branch.  It's enough for Sherlock to take a breath, put aside his irritation, and return to the matter at hand.  "You told her you'll see her tonight."  
  
"Mm-hm."  Jim sits back, finished, and Sherlock concedes to at least starting on his main dish.  "Not going there to see her specifically, but Alan is a bit fond of her."  
  
Sherlock lifts an eyebrow.  "Fond of dominating her, going by the body language."  
  
Jim smiles.  "I said he was a good boy.  Never said he wasn't kinky.  Don't give me that look, he's a perfect gentleman about it...Jesus, are you really just starting on that potato now?"  
  
Ignoring him, Sherlock summarizes, "So you just go...wherever you go, and spend the evening pretending to be someone else?"  
  
"Being," Jim corrects.  "Being someone else."  
  
Novel.  Exhausting, at least for Sherlock it would be, but novel, and likely not at all tiring for Jim.  Jim acts; Jim tells stories.  He shapes and reshapes his own narrative until he gets the response he wants.  He always has.  It has never become less fascinating to watch.  Mouth curving up, Sherlock asks, "Who else are you?"  
  
Jim watches him for a beat, then asks, "Want to see for yourself?"  
  
Sherlock blinks.  "Tonight?"  
  
"If you’ve finished your fucking lunch by then,” Jim teases.  “I did say I'd bring you with me sometime."  
  
"You also said I would hate it."  
  
"Probably."  
  
"And there was a question of what I'm to wear."  
  
Unsettlingly, Jim smiles.

-

It was not a difficult deduction to make to begin with, even less so after Jim raided Sherlock’s dresser drawers and closet and dressed him as...well, as himself, but not quite.  Himself, if he were the sort of person to go to a place like this, which, as it happens, he is decidedly not.  He cannot help but bristle with betrayal while Jim strolls in beside him.  Jim also does and does not look like himself, disorientingly trendy and approachable, but then, Sherlock remembers, Jim is not here to be himself.

Regardless, Sherlock is not amused.  “You’ve brought me to a torture chamber.”

“Have I?  How dramatic of me.”  Jim grins, his high spirits untouched.  “Are you so afraid of a bit of drinking and dancing?”

“Substance abuse and mating displays,” Sherlock mutters.

“A lovely night out,” Jim corrects, “by the definition of the normals, by whose rules we will be playing from the moment we step through that door until the moment we step through it again.”

Sherlock huffs, dragging his feet as he follows Jim down the hall.  “ _Must_ we?”

“Oh, relax.  It’s a perfectly sound experiment.”  Jim links hands with him - surreptitiously pressing a small, rectangular something into Sherlock’s palm - and tugs him along, paying cover for both of them at the door.  When asked to show identification, Jim lets go of Sherlock’s hand, leaving the object with him, and digs in his wallet.  While he does so, Sherlock takes a glance at what he’s been given, and finds that he’s holding a quite convincing fake ID.  Apparently he is twenty-two years old, and his name is Peter Bell.  In spite of himself, he fights a smile at the name.  Jim has sent him to Neverland again.

Both IDs are successful, and Sherlock takes a fortifying breath, then follows Jim into the abyss.

It is an immediate assault to his senses.  The beat - for Sherlock will not do it the favor of calling it music - is deafening, the flash of strobe lights irritating, the floor swarming with sweaty, heavily perfumed and cologned bodies.  It is overwhelming, and when Jim knowingly reaches back for him, he gratefully takes his hand, the better not to become separated and forced to negotiate the masses.

Jim leads him to the bar - still too crowded, but at least a bit calmer - and directs him to sit down, remaining standing himself.  He reassuringly squeezes Sherlock’s shoulders, then drapes both arms over them.   _Sit here,_ he signs in front of Sherlock’s face, a far more effective option than attempting to be heard over the din, _enjoy a drink, and don't ignore Pink Girl when she comes to talk to you._  Sherlock follows Jim’s gaze and spots a girl with streaks of pink dye in her hair, who, yes, is showing in her body language that she will be approaching him in the next five minutes. Getting his attention again, Jim pointedly signs, _Learn the language._

Sherlock frowns and crossly signs back, _Where will you be?_

Jim gently takes his chin and points him toward the crowded dance floor, then returns his hands to Sherlock's shoulders and speaks against his ear.  "One hour of immersion.  Show me you can do it."

Sherlock turns enough to angle a glare at Jim for abusing his knowledge of precisely how to get him to do something he doesn't want to do, because now it's a matter of prowess and pride, and to back out would be to lose the game.  Jim's smile is victorious, and he flags down the bartender ( _art student, kickboxer, hearing aids, preference for men_ ).  "Hey, sexy," Jim greets him in both speech and sign, earning a surprised grin even though clearly the bartender is perfectly capable of reading lips with the help of the hearing aids.  "You keep my friend here well taken care of."  He pats Sherlock on the shoulders and gives the man a winning smile, charming and contagious.  He has already shifted, though this character has a different energy about him than Alan had.  "Do that for me?"

The bartender gives Jim a thumbs-up, and Jim holds eye contact and signs a _Thank you_ without moving his lips, likely a strategic move to further cement himself in the bartender's mind.  Then he squeezes Sherlock's shoulders once more, murmurs, “I’m Richard, if you need me,” against his ear, presses a kiss to his cheek so quickly that Sherlock nearly misses it, and then vanishes into the throng.

Richard.  A new name, a new character.  The nuances of him come through as Jim weaves his way to the heart of the crowd: his gait is looser, less efficient, and he is placing himself right in the middle of things, rather than taking up his usual comfortable invisibility along the periphery.  His smile is broad and easy.  He blends in; he belongs.

A drink appears by Sherlock's hand, and he looks up at the still-charmed bartender.  He offers a tight smile and nod in return and accepts it, and he's given a good-natured wink before the bartender leaves to go about his tasks.  Belatedly, Sherlock wonders if it would have been better to initiate a conversation, perhaps show that he can sign as well.  Bartenders are meant to be easy to talk to; he is on the clock, and so he would at least make an effort.  The rest of the patrons will be unlikely to show the same courtesy.  Sighing, Sherlock takes a glum sip of his drink and swivels on the stool, searching the crowd for where Jim ended up.  If nothing else, he can recognize an opportunity for what it is.  He has never stopped secretly hoping to see Jim dance.

He finds him again after a bit of hunting, and then wonders how he could have missed him.

Moving through the strobe lights, Jim is something else entirely.  He moves differently, graceful and confident, intimidating without size, alluring without effort.  He presides.  It's fascinating, watching the effects of his natural magnetism at work.  Everyone near him notices him, and then can’t seem to work out why they have.

Idly, Sherlock wonders if Jim dances differently when he’s being Alan, or one of his other characters.  When he’s being himself.  This is no clumsy waltz in the dark.

He’s partnered up now, at least for the time being, with a girl Sherlock doesn’t recognize.  There is communication happening here, a wordless conversation of an entirely different nature than the silent conversations Jim has with Sherlock.  Every movement is deliberate, every flick of the eye and skim of the fingers, the angle of his head that allows his lips to almost-accidentally brush her neck as they dance, the sway of her hips against his front.  It's a language Sherlock can recognize, but not speak, not fully comprehend.  Jim, it seems, is working his way toward fluency.

"That your boyfriend?"

Sherlock blinks out of his trance and turns toward the voice - ah.  Pink Girl, right on schedule.  ( _Drama student, two cats, recent breakup, buzzed-to-drunk._ )  She's settled in next to him, and by the look of it, she's been watching him watch Jim for more than a few seconds, which is mildly unsettling.  He lifts his drink, ready to hide in it as necessary.  "No."

"Really?"  She smiles, crooked and teasing.  "You care if I make him mine?"

"Highly unlikely."

Rude, he remembers a second after saying it that connotations make it rude, but she seems unbothered.  "I like a challenge.  Help a girl out.  What's his story?"

"Double-murderer, operates under multiple false identities, and eats far too quickly not to suffer frequent indigestion," Sherlock flatly rattles off, ready for her to go away.

To his distress, she laughs.  "You're funny.  Did you know you're funny?"

"I’m really not.”

“You really are,” she mocks back, pitching her voice low in a weak imitation of him, and he narrows his eyes.  “If you’ve got dibs, all you’ve got to do is say so.  Don’t need to try and frighten me off.”

“I’m not.  However, while I have no intention of staking a claim of that nature, I feel I should warn you that he’s not your type.”

Her eyebrows shoot up.  “Oh, really?  And what exactly would you know about my type, strange man who doesn’t even know my name?”

“The pink,” Sherlock says, hardly needing to look.  “It’s a fresh dye job, not more than a week old, to go with the haircut you received at approximately the same time, likely the same appointment.  My friend has been coming here frequently all semester, but you’re asking me about him, which means this place is new for you, as well.”  His gaze travels.  “New clothes, freshly manicured fingernails - you’re attempting a new start, which puts the breakup at, what, four weeks ago?  Possibly five.  Not initiated by you, hence the change in decorative choices, but also bringing us to your reason for asking in the first place: you are searching for a _rebound_.  Someone entirely unlike what you had before, which, it seems, is my friend.  And I assure you, if you are looking for someone to use in that manner, you would be best served by looking elsewhere.”

Pink Girl’s face has journeyed from surprise to self-consciousness, to offense, to stunned anger.  “How--what the hell are you playing at?  Have you been _spying_ on me?”

Sherlock rolls his eyes, in familiar territory now.  “No.  You’re just rather transparent.  I am merely observing and advising.”

“You’re an _arse_ , is what you are.”

“You're hardly the first to say so.”

She watches him with narrowed eyes as he takes a slow sip of his drink, hoping that perhaps she’ll go off in a huff before he’s done.  He has no such luck.  "Seriously, how did you know all that?"  
  
"I just told you how."  
  
"Prove it."  
  
Sherlock huffs a sigh.  "I was right .  Isn't that proof enough?"  
  
"No."  She looks around, then nods over his shoulder.  "Do him."  
  
"It's not a party trick."  
  
"So you can't?" she challenges, and Sherlock presses his lips together, cursing his own pride.  He follows her gaze to the subject in question, currently dancing with a friend on the edge of the dance floor, and takes a moment to study him before turning back around.  
  
"Brass player," he concludes.  "Likely trombone, based on the slight variance in the muscular development of his arms and shoulders.  Brass, because the definition around his mouth is consistent with a brass embouchure.  It's a hobby, not an obligation, as he plays in spite of mild asthma.  He makes do.  Right now he's trying to impress his dance partner, the girl in the red, so his movement is more vigorous than would be ideal.  He's already winded.  He'll likely be stepping away to use an inhaler in the next minute or so."  
  
Pink Girl stares at him.  "You were looking at him for like five seconds."  She looks over his shoulder again, and her mouth falls open.  "You are fucking kidding me."  
  
"Inhaler, I presume," Sherlock checks, not bothering to turn and look.  
  
"You're _kidding_ me," she repeats.  "He's doing it, right now.  Just what you said.  He's taking the bloody inhaler."  
  
Sherlock sips his drink, smug.  "I know."  
  
Pink Girl looks at him again, then glances at the entrance, where a group has just come in.  "Him, the blond one."  
  
A glance.  "Football player.  Injured himself recently, twisted his left ankle.  He'll still be wearing the brace."  
  
"Single?"  
  
"Gay.  And no."  
  
They watch the blond claim a barstool, favoring his left foot, the cuff of his pants riding up when he sits and revealing the white of an ankle support brace.  Another member of his group, a broader man with dark hair and eyes, rests a hand tellingly in the small of the blond's back as he leans in to order.  
  
Pink Girl's skepticism has all but gone, her eyes round.  "Oh my God."  
  
"No such thing."

“Are you like a psychic or something?”

“Also no such thing.”

“Stop that.”

“Stop considering using my talents to find yourself a passable rebound, stop considering _me_ for the role - will never happen - and stop gawking, and I will.  Even better, go elsewhere, and we’ll both get our wishes.”

She is still too bemused to take offense.  “Why are you even here, if you don’t want anyone to talk to you?”

Sherlock takes another pull of his drink.  “I was invited.”

“By your friend?”

“Obviously.”

She studies him for a moment, then says, “So this really isn’t some sort of freaky wingman act.  You really are just an arse who’s really smart, or something, and you really just don’t want me to be shitty to your friend.”

Sherlock frowns at her, unsure where she intends to go with this, and she nods.  “That’s a bit cool, actually.”  Standing, she smooths down her skirt.  “I’m going to go be _not_ -shitty to your friend, thank you, and extend an invitation.  I’ve got friends who come here sometimes; that’s how I found out about this place, but their house parties are better.  You two should party with us sometime.  They’ve got some good booze, and some other stuff.”  She quirks an eyebrow at him.  “You might even crack a smile.”

Sherlock pointedly does not smile, and she about-faces and makes her way onto the dance floor.  He watches as she approaches Jim from behind, laying her hands on his shoulders and saying something against his ear.  Jim’s eyebrows go up, and he turns around to look at her properly.  He takes her hips and leans in close to say something back to her, and they exchange a smile.

Disconcerted, Sherlock turns back to his drink.  He is not entirely sure what just happened, which is frustrating.  This always seems to happen when he attempts interaction with normal people.  They don’t follow logical patterns.  Attempting to relate to them is exhausting and futile, and all at once he cannot stand to be around them any longer.  He wants to be alone at his desk in his quiet, familiar flat.

As that is not currently an option, he finishes off his drink and retreats outside for a smoke.

Jim finds him before long, flushed and exhilarated from his dancing.  He is going to grow very cold, very quickly, as his sweat does its job in the November chill.  “Given up already?” he asks.  “It looked like you were doing well.”  

Sherlock rolls his eyes, puffing on his cigarette.  “I don’t understand them.”

“Who says you have to?”  Jim leans against the wall next to him, seeming to enjoy the cold for the moment.  “As long as you can pretend, it doesn’t matter if you understand.  Just need to know how to get what you need out of them.”

Sherlock presses his lips together, still feeling gloomy, though the cigarette is taking the edge off his irritation.  “I wanted to understand them, once.”

“But it never worked,” Jim finishes for him, softened by familiarity.  This is Sherlock’s story, and it is Jim’s story.  Their story.  “They could always tell.”

“That we were different.”  Sherlock nods.  He exhales a cloud of smoke, dropping his head back against the wall.  “It’s never changed.”

Jim is quiet next to him for a long moment.  “Do you want to go?”

He does, badly.  “You want to stay.”

“I said I’d look after you, didn’t I?” Jim says, crossing his arms as goosebumps begin to dot them.  “The normals will still be here next week.  The normals will always be here.”

Sherlock considers.  It is an out, free of judgement, because Jim understands the miserable twist of the gut that led Sherlock to escape in the first place.  A considerate offer.  A tempting one.

He flicks the cigarette butt away, takes Jim by the hand, and leads him back inside to get warm.  “It hasn’t been an hour yet.”

“So?”

“That was your challenge.”  He rubs heat back into Jim’s upper arms while Jim studies him intently, the way he does whenever Sherlock does something unexpected, as though looking hard enough will give him the answer.  “I intend to see it through, provided that you let me do it my way.  Observation before interaction.  My strengths before yours.”  He stops rubbing, holding Jim’s arms.  “Is that acceptable?”

Jim is giving him that peculiar expression again, as though reveling in the uncertainty of what to make of him.  Slowly, he nods.  “Whatever you like, love.”

The moniker is new - quite possibly a side effect of being Richard, as he seems the type - but it is casual, comfortable, and Sherlock allows it.  “Very well.”  He gives himself one more deep breath in the relative quiet, then goes with Jim back down the hall toward the attendant they fooled to get in.

“By the way,” Jim murmurs as they go, “I’m fairly certain that Pink Girl and company want us to do drugs with them."  He squints.  "And possibly have an orgy.”

“I gathered, yes.”

Jim grins.  “‘Substance abuse and mating displays.’”

“Precisely.”

They show their stamped hands to the attendant and go side-by-side back into the abyss.

-

_December_

 

The phone rings.  It startles both of them out of their projects - Sherlock at the desk scrawling a draft of an essay detailing the inanity of the original essay prompt, Jim lying on his bed with a textbook propped open against his bent legs - because Jim’s phone never rings.

For some reason, they glance at each other first, as though one of them has engineered the sound and owes an explanation, but then the phone rings again, and Jim shakes the moment off and lifts the phone off of the receiver on the bedside table, pulling it to his ear.  “Hello?”

Someone speaks indistinctly on the other end, and Jim goes still.  “This is him.”  A beat, and Jim silently pulls in a breath.  He slowly sits up, swings his legs off the edge of the bed, and wets his lips.  Quietly, he asks, “Is he all right?”

His voice has shifted, subtly and significantly, and Sherlock sets his pencil down just in time for Jim to reach blindly for him, eyes unfocused.  Sherlock reaches back, and Jim immediately clasps his forearm tightly.  Another moment, and his breath changes.  His face flickers with triumph, just for a moment, before he closes his eyes.  “Oh.  God.  God, we thought--they said he was getting better.”

He opens his eyes again, and Sherlock begins to understand.  Jim’s emotion is not an act, but nevertheless, he is _acting_.  The emotion in his voice is different than the one his body is expressing.  His tone tells a story of shock, of numb grief; his face, his shoulders, and his grip on Sherlock’s arm tell a story of deep and staggering relief.

Jim takes a breath, and it shakes, just a bit, because he has been practicing his acting, and it shows.  “Identify the--Jesus.”  He rubs a hand over his mouth, swallows.  “Right.  Right, of course, I can...I was going to be back this week for winter hols, anyway, I can just...right.”  His eyes go unfocused again; he is thinking, planning, rapid and thorough.  “Of course.  God.  Uh, thank you.  For calling.”  A pause, approximately the length of _I’m sorry for your loss._  “Thank you.”

He hangs up the phone with a quiet click and brings his hand back to his lap, still hanging on to Sherlock with the other.  For a long moment, he sits quietly, face blank, looking at nothing.  Then, quietly, he says, “It’s done.”  One slow breath, in and out.  “He’s gone.”

Sherlock squeezes Jim’s forearm in return, unsure what is best to say.  The situation is, to put it lightly, unique.  Ultimately, he speaks to Jim the way he always does, simply asking what he wants to know.

“How do you feel?”

Jim’s eyebrows twitch downward, just a bit.  He thinks.  

“Like...” he says slowly, “... _Veris leta facies_.”

It only takes Sherlock a moment to connect it to the correct memory.   _Veris leta facies_ [ 1 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoq3UbFlB90) , the third song of the symphony they snuck into years ago, the symphony Sherlock still cannot quite keep from thinking of as _theirs_.  It’s a quiet song in a minor key, misty and contemplative, strangely melancholy despite the subject matter.  Sherlock’s Latin is imperfect, but he can recognize enough words to know that the song tells of the coming of spring, the end of a hard winter, the promise of joys to come.  A profound and long-awaited relief.  Sherlock always wondered why, in spite of that, the melody felt tentative, in suspension, like a held breath.

It perfectly matches the too-little and too-much in Jim’s face right now, and for the first time, the song makes sense.

Sherlock holds on, and lets him hold on, as long as he needs to.  “You weren’t going to go back there for the holidays.”

“‘Course not,” Jim says, still distant, distracted by the inside of his skull.  “Only that’s what normal people do, isn’t it?  Go back.”

He does not talk about his home as though he has any desire to return to it, and Sherlock reminds him, “No one can force you to be present.”

“No,” Jim murmurs, shaking his head.  “No, I want to see it.  That corpse.”  His jaw works with old, old anger, the dangerous glimmer rising behind his eyes.  His voice remains soft and even.  “I want to smell the embalming fluid they pump into his veins after they’ve drained him dry.”

Sherlock tightens his grip slightly, hoping to coax Jim back from wherever his mind is taking him.  “When will you go?”

The direct question seems to successfully draw Jim at least partly back to the present moment.  He blinks as though shaking off a dizzy spell, and he abruptly lets go of Sherlock, springing to his feet to begin pacing about the room.  “Tomorrow.  Early.  Need to get the identification out of the way--and calls.  Got calls to make, after that.  Calls to make,” he repeats to himself, his accent shifting, moving toward British.  “Calls...to...make.  Sorry for your loss.  I’m so sorry for your loss.”  He repeats it a few more times, playing with the strength of the accent and the pitch of his voice, with different levels of professional distance.  “Deepest condolences, our _deepest_ condolences--that one, did that sound like me?”

“Not at all,” Sherlock answers.  “Why change your voice?”

“For Mum,” Jim replies, snatching up a notepad from his desk and flipping it open, starting to furiously write things down.  “Can’t call her as me, she’ll hang up.  And I need her to be there, so then...and a distraction.  Need to get her there and get her out of the way, not for long, only…”  

He pauses mid-step to scribble something else onto the notepad, and Sherlock carefully asks, “Why would she hang up?”

Jim briefly closes his eyes, huffing out a breath.  Opening them, he quietly replies, “Because, once upon a time, I damaged someone who was more hers than I was.”

Sherlock frowns, and Jim frowns back.  “So surprised?  Did you think I was like this because of them?  Oh, no.”  He is pacing again, only half here.  “They're like this because of me.”

While Sherlock processes that, Jim whirls on his heel again, muttering inaudibly to himself, one hand moving in the air as though manipulating puzzle pieces.  Pacing back around, he glances at Sherlock again.  “Stay if you like, but out of the way.  It’s in motion, now, lots of moving parts, I need to…”  

He gestures vaguely toward his head, and Sherlock nods.  He recognizes this whirlwind of thought, of working and planning, unstoppable once it has begun.  Likely Jim will only vaguely notice whether Sherlock is there at all.

Sherlock stays.

-

Jim chews his nails while they wait for the train, and not for the first time, Sherlock considers buying himself a ticket and simply following him on board.  It would promise to be better than whatever tedium is waiting for him at home, and something about this development has got Jim anxious.  It isn't the murder itself, Sherlock can tell; Jim could not care less about having engineered the end of a family member's life, particularly a family member with a history of damaging him.  Something else has him tightly wound, an anticipatory tension.  Sherlock suspects that it is related to Jim's brief mention of his mother, but he is also reasonably certain that she is not the primary source of this, either.  It's yet another of Jim's little mysteries, another question mark on a personal life that he's managed to keep largely private over the course of six years.

Oh, to chase this mystery, to stay with Jim and help to calm the beast in his brain, rather than endure a too-skinny Mycroft's judgement while Mummy relegates him to potato-peeling duty.  He is so very tempted.  Perhaps he will.  Perhaps--

"No," Jim says around the finger he's slowly mutilating, his eyes still far away.  He has not been fully present, fully _here_ , since he received the call.  Sherlock pulls his gaze from the ticket window with a frown, well aware that he's being transparent.  "Love for you to come, but better if you don't."

The skin around his cuticles is turning red from his gnawing.  Unfortunate.  Before this, he was doing well.

When Sherlock offers him a cigarette, Jim mutters, "God, yes," and gratefully accepts.  His fingers are given a reprieve when he replaces them with the cigarette and lights up, his eyes sliding shut in relief as he exhales.  Sherlock lets him keep it, pulling out a second one for himself.

"How long will you stay?" he asks, and Jim opens his eyes again with a degree of effort.

"'Til it's done."

"When is it done?"

"Body buried, rituals completed, necessary conversations had."  Jim takes another long drag.  "After that?  Dunno.  May just wander a bit."

Sherlock pauses, frowning through an unexpected spike of alarm.  "You _are_ coming back for the second semester?"

"Of course, doofus."  It's the first smile Jim has cracked in a spell, short-lived but significant.  "I'm not leaving you."

That, too, is significant.  "Thank you."

Jim presses his arm to Sherlock's, and they smoke in silence, leaning on each other a bit.  It strikes Sherlock, abrupt and strange, that he will miss Jim.  Absurd, considering that not so long ago they coped perfectly well without seeing each other for months at a time, but they have adapted.  They have had the time and space to latch on, which makes it all the more unpleasant to be pulled apart.

As though following Sherlock's train of thought, Jim murmurs, "Won't be long."

He could be talking about their few remaining minutes before his train's arrival time, or about the few weeks they will be apart.  Regardless, whether it was a warning or a reassurance, Sherlock removes his hand from his pocket to pull Jim properly into his side.  Jim lets out a long, smoky exhale as soon as he does, sinking into him, the hard line of tension slowly draining from his spine.

Jim has always been more demonstrative than Sherlock - Sherlock would go so far as to say Jim _requires_ touch in a way that he himself never has - but that does not mean that Sherlock does not feel the benefit of it.  This particular closeness, in this particular moment, feels...correct.

At a hush, apropos of nothing, Jim says, “Zero seven, seven hundred, nine hundred, seven eight one.”  He takes another slow drag, resting his head comfortably in the crook of Sherlock's neck as he exhales.  “No one there to intercept the call anymore if you ring.  Bit faster than waiting for the post.”

Sherlock nods, committing the phone number to memory.  “I imagine you already know mine.”  Jim confirms with a tap to his own temple, and Sherlock warns, “I can make no promises about who may or may not intercept a call from you.”

“If it’s your brother, I promise to make him _deliciously_ uncomfortable.”

Sherlock makes a face.  “Never use that adverb in reference to him again.”

Jim chuckles, and they glance up at the sound of a train horn.  Jim sighs.  “My cue, I’m afraid.”  He reaches to put out his cigarette in an ashtray.  “Bodies to identify, funerals to plan, details to obscure.”  He smiles, tired but impish.  “Work, and all that.”

“Naturally.”

Still, they don’t move until the train pulls in, at which point Jim reluctantly steps away to pick up his bag, and Sherlock sneaks a small token into Jim’s coat pocket.  Now is not the time to discuss their game, but Sherlock did have several free hours on his hands last night while Jim was planning.  Plenty of time to take the last few steps and cover the last bit of research needed to solve Jim’s murder mystery, write down his conclusion and how he reached it, and fold it up to give to Jim at an opportune moment.  Whether he notices it on the train or later, Sherlock imagines, the moment will be right.

As Jim hefts his luggage over his shoulder, Sherlock reminds him, “Call me when it’s done.”

“Obviously.”  Not quite smiling, but closer to it than to anything else, he adds, “Happy Christmas, Mr. Holmes.”

His mouth quirks ironically upward as he says it, and Sherlock huffs with amusement.  It is such a normal thing to say that it feels entirely abnormal coming from either of them.  Sherlock supposes he would not have it any other way.

“Happy Christmas, Mr. Moriarty.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Funny story: I originally thought I could cram three years of university into one chapter. Ha..........ha. No.


	4. Interlude: Winter Holiday 1995

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s ~~several months until~~ Christmas! Have an ~~entirely chapter-sized~~ interlude!
> 
> Take note: There is a segment of this chapter in which a character experiences acute mental health issues. There is also vague discussion of disordered eating. Along with, y’know, the murder and whatnot. Ye be warned.
> 
> There have been a couple of questions about the Asexual Aromantic Sherlock tag on this story - please, ask away! Asexuality and aromanticism are each a spectrum in and of themselves, and people who identify as either will have a wide variety of individual experiences and preferences. This story's interpretation of Sherlock is a combination of cues he has given in canon, experiences I've heard from others, and my own experience as an ace-aro spectrum human. :) Sherlock will be continuing to explore his own orientation in the coming chapters. (If you're interested in learning more about either of these orientations, [Asexuality.org](http://www.asexuality.org/home/) has info aplenty!)
> 
> Thank you all for the kind comments and for sticking with me this far. The positive response to this story has just knocked me over, and it motivates me so much. Thank you for your patience, as there is plenty more of this story to come!

Behind the closed door of his childhood bedroom, Sherlock is building a palace.

It has taken a few tries, a few false starts.  Choosing a starting point was the first challenge, an incredibly important step.  It’s meant to be a hub of sorts, a home base, a place he can easily return after his focus has been broken.  Jim would laugh, he imagines - such time and mental energy Sherlock put into agonizing over that starting point, only to walk through his bedroom door when he got home and realize that once again, in pursuit of increasingly complicated possibilities, he had overlooked the most simple and obvious answer.

He is getting better at focusing.  Mummy and Dad have always been content to leave him and Mycroft to their own devices, so the distractions are minimal.  Lying in his twin bed, legs bent and feet flat on the mattress (as they now hang rather ridiculously over the edge of the bed otherwise), he has managed to retreat fully inward.

In his mind palace, his bedroom is both the same and not.  Extra shelves and nooks and hidden doors have appeared as he has begun the lengthy process of reorganizing his hard drive.  Stored by his chemistry set are the fundamentals of the science, the hard facts he picked up in primary school while his classmates slogged through the Periodic Table, while on the higher shelves he has placed the finer, more esoteric details.  Under his bed is his growing compendium of classifications of dust.  In the drawer where he used to hide his cigarettes are secrets, overheard and confided and kept.  Underneath the third floorboard, kept safely in its locked box, is everything to date that he has learned about Jim.

It is a meticulous process, but the world of meticulous things is one in which Sherlock has always been quite comfortable.  In time, when he has exhausted the possibilities of his mental bedroom, he will construct the hall that leads to Mycroft’s room; for all of their difficulties, Sherlock doesn’t doubt that he has learned more from his brother than from anyone else in his eighteen years and seven months of life.  It will be its own project, filling that room.  After that, the garden out back where he and Mycroft had the grandest of adventures when Sherlock was small.  And from there, perhaps--

A knock at the door jars him out of his trance, the palace snapping out, a doused candle.  Sherlock blinks at the ceiling, disoriented, while Mummy calls through the door, “William, phone for you!  If you can be bothered to leave your room at _some_ point before the new year--”

“Phone’s never for me,” Sherlock calls back, irritated and distracted, sliding uncomfortably back into the world, like pulling on a jumper when one is soaking wet.  “Who is it?”

“I wouldn’t know, would I?  It’s your brother that answered, only he didn’t want to shout all the way from the sitting room.  He was making such a face.”

Something clicks in the back of Sherlock’s mind, and he sits bolt upright.  Mummy has already sidestepped out of the way in anticipation when he throws open the door, because she always knows, and she gives him a look as he brushes past.  Not unlike the look he gets from Mycroft when he steps into the living room, and oh, that face is _excellent_.

He reaches for the phone, but Mycroft holds it out of reach with his hand over the receiver, glaring.  “ _Control_ him,” he hisses.

“Absolutely not.”  Sherlock scuffles with his brother until he can wrestle the phone away - easier, now that their sizes are so much more comparable than before - and Mycroft huffs and makes his exit.  Alone with his caller, Sherlock pulls the phone to his ear.  “You may withhold any unfortunate adverbs you may be considering.”

Jim’s voice is smirking, tired, and achingly welcome.  “You’re thinking it now, anyway.”

Sherlock’s face breaks into the same wide, cheek-hurting smile he experienced as a boy every time he received a new letter from the mysterious _M_.  “What did you say to him?”

“Not telling.  How’d he look?”

“As though he’d unexpectedly consumed the entirety of a lemon.”

Jim cackles over the line, and the sound is a relief.  Not much worse for wear, then.  Sherlock prods, "I take it that it's done?"

"Mm-hm.  Yours?"

Sherlock snorts.  "A vaguely pagan religious holiday is hardly a death ritual."

"Oh, use your imagination.”  Jim’s good humor is only partly forced, his voice the slightest bit breathy, the sound of exhaustion.  “Forced familial interactions, choral music to make your ears bleed, lots of fuss about Jesus.  Boxes that are best left unopened."  Sherlock can hear him grinning now, endearingly wicked.  "Not such a terrible leap."

"Yes, it's done," Sherlock says, rolling his eyes, still smiling in spite of himself.  "Underwhelming, as always."

"Now, _that_ I don't believe."  Correctly.  “Big brother sounded a bit faint.  Has he been eating enough?”

No, he has not.  “He didn’t sound faint.”

“Looks it, though.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do now.”

Retracing his footsteps, Sherlock perches in the easy chair, feet pulled up.  He does not want to talk to Jim about Mycroft.  Not about his distraction, or his calm refusal to speak a word about his new government position.  Not about how much older he looks than he did before his promotion.  Not about the muffled vomiting Sherlock overheard in the hallway bathroom last night, and not about the quiet conversation he nearly walked in on - the two of them sitting on the back doorstep, Dad’s hand on Mycroft’s shoulder, Mycroft’s back slumped the way he only allows when Dad is looking after him.  Talking about those things means thinking about them, and Sherlock doesn’t want to, so he observes, “You haven’t slept.”

“Sure I have.”

"The first night, perhaps.  Not since.  Why?"

"Busy."

"Why else?"

"Mm.  Later."  There is rustling, as though Jim is getting comfortable.  Sherlock pictures him slumping into a worn easy chair of his own, dropping his head back and stretching out his throat the way he does, closing his eyes against weak winter light coming through a window.  "Talk about something, will you?” he asks, and from his tone Sherlock can add detail to the picture - Jim’s fingers pressing into the bridge of his nose, his brow faintly furrowed against a headache, or another source of mild stress.  “Anything.  Tell me what you hate about Christmas."

"Oh, you already know that list."  Sherlock pauses.  "Are you all right?"

"'Course."

"Something's changed."

"Got a haircut."

"Jim."

"Sherlock."  There is a beat of nothing, a quiet sigh.  "Please."

A rare word from either of their mouths, and it strikes Sherlock silent for a beat as curiosity buzzes down to his nerve endings.  With only voices between them, no concrete body language to explore, no small touch to make Jim inexplicably soften and roll his eyes and concede, Sherlock has little to work with just now.  He will need to wait.

Conceding, he grants Jim his request.  “I’ve begun a construction project.”

“Have you?”  He knows, by now, the sound of Jim’s relief.  “What sort?”

Sherlock smiles.  “A palace.”

“Oh, Jesus, you’re actually doing it.”

“I am.”

"Of course you are," Jim says, exasperated but fond.  "Let's have it, then.  Is it an Alcazar Castle, or more of a Turin Tower?"  
  
"Not yet determined.  I'm filling one room at a time."  
  
Jim groans.  "Sounds awful.  You have fun with that, love."  
  
Sherlock's smile broadens.  A week trapped with his family, and he had already started to forget that conversations could in fact be easy.  "I am."  
  
He distracts Jim with the details of the building process, and then with groaning over the non-traditions observed at holidays in the Holmes house, and then with an impromptu volley of languages, seeing who can last longest without getting stumped.  This quickly turns into an appalled Jim going on a forceful tangent about how Gaelic is meant to sound, vowing to educate Sherlock on it properly by year's end if it kills him, while Sherlock presses his lips together and tries not to laugh at how high Jim's voice goes on the rare occasion that he is genuinely scandalized.  
  
It's easy, all of it.  They might be sitting in Sherlock's flat in the dead of night, having this same conversation, burning through the hours until one of them notices the sun rising.  At least, they might be, if not for Mummy passing through and pausing.  "For goodness' sake, William, have you been tying up the line all this time?"  
  
Through the receiver, Jim pauses his rant.  His voice begins to smile.  "Did she call you William?"  
  
"No, she did not.  A moment."  Sherlock covers the phone and eyes Mummy while Jim snickers in his ear.  "Problem?"  
  
"Who on earth have you been talking to all this time?"  
  
"Does it matter?"  
  
"He's not going to answer," Mycroft calls smugly from the other room.  A moment, and he appears in the doorway.  "He's quite committed to keeping his special friend a secret."  
  
Sherlock's mouth drops open, and he looks murderously at Mycroft while Mummy's eyebrows shoot up.  "'Special friend?'  William, is that a girl you've been talking to?"  
  
"Hardly," Sherlock scoffs before thinking, then grimaces when Mummy's eyebrows climb higher.  
  
"And we haven't met him?" she accuses, while Mycroft leans on the doorframe looking terribly pleased with himself.  "Surely you don't think your father and I would mind if you were--"  
  
"Mycroft was vomiting last night," Sherlock blurts, anything to reroute this disastrous interrogation.  "I heard him.  Ask him about it, I'm sure his denials will be fascinating."

“He’s deflecting,” Mycroft argues immediately, fixing Sherlock with a hard, warning look.

Mummy raises her hands, pointing in both of their directions.  “You’re both deflecting, and I won’t have it.  William, say goodbye to your friend and go help your father shovel the walk.  Myke, sit back down so I can take your temperature.”

“No one ever _calls_ here anyway,” Sherlock protests while Mycroft insists, “I’m _fine_ , and for the thousandth time, don’t call me--”

“Boys!” Mummy warns, and they both shut their mouths, well acquainted with that particular tone.

Looking as harassed as one physically can, Mycroft grudgingly takes a seat while Mummy fetches the thermometer.  Glumly, Sherlock takes his hand off the phone and mutters, “Another time, I’m afraid.”

Jim’s smile is audibly impish.  “I like your family.”

“That makes one of us.”  Sherlock glares at Mycroft, who mirrors it back at him, a silent and mutual, _This is your fault._

Jim chuckles.  “See you in a week, _William_.”

“Unwise, _James_.”

Jim snorts while Mycroft nearly injures himself rolling his eyes, and they say their goodbyes just as Mummy comes back in.  Sherlock makes a show of hanging up before she can scold him, then swings to his feet and goes to get his coat, though not before taking a mental snapshot of Mycroft the Proper Adult sitting unhappily with a thermometer hanging out of his mouth.

Amusing as the image is, however, it unfortunately brings back to the surface the fact that even if he hasn’t got a temperature, Mycroft - shrinking Mycroft, cagey Mycroft, whose shoulders slumped with an invisible weight as soon as Dad got him alone - is not all right.

The snow outside isn’t overly deep, but there is quite a lot of driveway, so Dad has made only partial progress by the time Sherlock joins him.  They don’t exchange pleasantries beyond a brief welcoming smile from Dad, as none of them in this house have ever been much for pleasantries; Sherlock only takes up a shovel, chooses a starting point, and begins helping.  He has never minded physical work like this, to his parents’ delight.  He is familiar enough with the positive effects of physical activity on the brain, and even without that, a bit of labor has always provided an excellent outlet for the restless energy that perpetually resides in the marrow of his bones.

For a while, they only work.  The front of Sherlock’s mind turns pleasantly to white noise while he does, though at the back, gears are still turning.  

Reasons, reasons.  He has never imagined Mycroft to be self-conscious; why should the cleverest person in any and every room spare a thought for something so insignificant as his body shape?  The notion is absurd.  Mycroft’s reactions to Sherlock’s guesses over the phone implied that it truly was neither pressure from a superior at work nor some sort of romantic...thing.  And that was all assuming the weight was the root of it.  For years, he and Mycroft have shared very little about their inner worlds, because somewhere along the line, they lost the privilege of accessing any pieces of each other that they cannot readily observe.  To Sherlock’s displeasure, he is finding that with every passing year, he seems to know his brother a bit less.

Dad pauses to lean on his shovel, resting his back a moment before returning to digging, and Sherlock considers him.  Dad spoke to Mycroft.  While that does not guarantee that Mycroft spoke to _him_ , it is more of a lead than anything Sherlock has scrounged up since getting home.

Sherlock slows his work, but doesn’t stop.  It wouldn’t do to rob his hands of an activity.  “Dad.”

“Yes, son.”

“What’s wrong with Mycroft?”

Dad’s shovel slows, but doesn’t entirely stop, either.  Eyes on the snow, Dad says diplomatically, “Have you asked him?”

“Yes.  He was uncooperative.”

“Mm.”

There is nothing for a stretch, and Sherlock allows him time.  Dad is a man of slower thoughts and fewer words than the rest of them.  He listens more than he talks.  Talking takes him time.  Sherlock knows the words are ready to come when Dad’s face shifts into a small, regretful smile.

“You know,” he says, shaking his head a bit, “we forget sometimes, that you’re still boys.  Very clever ones, but that’s not the only thing you two are.”  He pauses a moment, hefting a large snow pile out of his path.  “I always think of that old hound of yours, Redbeard.  How poorly we handled that business with him.”

Sherlock carefully begins reciting the Latin alphabet in the back of his mind, because to this day it hurts to think on Redbeard too much.

“We assumed too much back then, I’m afraid.  I’m sure we still do.  We forgot, a bit, that just because you were clever enough to understand what was making an old dog sick, how it would progress, how little anyone could do about it, that didn’t mean you weren’t a boy losing his dog.  Didn’t mean it wouldn’t break your heart.”

“What does this have to do with Mycroft?” Sherlock presses, ready to move away from the subject and the tightness it inspires in his chest.

“Well,” Dad says, pausing a moment to shake out his hand, “not my place to say much.  But if you ask me, those government high-ups in charge of your brother’s ‘internship,’” he exchanges a knowing look with Sherlock, “are making the same sort of mistake.  They see your brother, quick young man that he is, and they assume.  He’s clever enough, good enough with that strategic mind your mother gave him, to make decisions that touch every British citizen alive, so I imagine they think that’s the same thing as being _ready_ for that sort of pressure.” 

Sherlock frowns.  It has never occurred to him to imagine Mycroft being unprepared for anything.  Mycroft is always prepared.  "He told you that?"

Dad laughs, going back to his shoveling.  "Oh, I know you boys don't tell me anything.  Would go right over my head, I'm sure.  It's just a guess, is all."

Sherlock angles his frown downward.  It's true enough.  He and Mycroft determined in their younger, united years that Dad wasn't there to be told things; only to be solid and soothing, and to calmly explain why the normal children were upset with them.  "And the weight?"

"Got it from me, I'm afraid."  Dad pats his own abdomen.  "Never could stomach much under stress.  There were times, as a boy, I wouldn't eat for days before a big exam.  Too anxious about it, you know, and then of course was too faint to concentrate worth anything.  Imagine it'd have been all the worse, had it been matters of life and death, day in and out.  Might have even changed from stress into something else.  Wanting to control something."  More softly, meeting Sherlock's eyes for the first time since he spoke, "But it is a bit alarming, isn't it?  Looking at him."

Sherlock swallows.  His frown is beginning to make his head ache.  He doesn't want to worry about Mycroft.  Just as Dad isn't there to be told things, Mycroft isn't there to be worried about.  He's only meant to do the worrying.  But if Dad is to be believed, then perhaps that is the problem.

"Make him stop," he weakly commands, feeling like a child, frustratingly helpless.

Dad beckons, and Sherlock crosses what remains of the snow, coming close enough for Dad to clasp his shoulder.  That's what he does, shoulder-clasping.  Not unlike Mycroft's worrying, or Mummy's warpaths, or Jim's touches.  They communicate similar sentiments.  "I think we can agree I'm hardly capable of making anyone in this house do a thing they don't want to do."  He gives Sherlock's shoulder a squeeze.  "Not to worry about your brother.  We've had a sit-down, the two of us.  He agreed to a few suggestions, on the condition that I don't bring it up with your mother."  He winks and releases Sherlock with a pat.  "We'll look after him, won't we?"

Not knowing the first thing about how to look after Mycroft, but unsure how else to respond, Sherlock nods.

“Right, then.”  Dad takes up his shovel again.  “Had better finish this up before it gets any colder.  Then perhaps see if those two high-strung creatures in there will join us for tea, hm?”

He smiles, and despite his concern, despite their differences, despite so many things, Sherlock cannot help but be comforted.  He nods again and lifts his shovel, finishing the rest of the work at his father’s side.

-

Mycroft’s holiday from work is markedly shorter than Sherlock’s holiday from school, but it is the longest Sherlock can remember him staying in years.  When he manages to corner him, Mycroft is packing with no haste at all, his skinny back to the door.

Without turning around, he warns, “You’re hovering.”

“Observing,” Sherlock corrects, planting himself in the doorway.  “Leaving so late?  Imagined you’d be gone days ago.”

“Well, while I do live to grant your wishes,” Mycroft says, his sarcasm saccharine, “I’ve stayed on Father’s request.”

Boring his gaze pointedly into the back of his brother’s head, Sherlock says, “I know.”

Mycroft’s hands briefly slow, but he gives no further indication that he’s heard the bits Sherlock did not say.  He did hear, of course; Mycroft always hears.  That was Mycroft’s other purpose, when they were children: he was to worry, first and foremost, but more than that, he was to hear what Mummy and Dad could not.  He was to hear _The other boys are stupid,_ and understand _No one played with me today_ ; to hear _I’m fine, leave me alone,_ and understand _I can’t get out of bed because I can’t feel anything._  Somehow, even as they’ve grown apart, Mycroft has somehow maintained his fluency in the language of Sherlock’s diction, his movement, his very breath.  It is conflicting and frustrating to be reminded of this, and of the fact that he himself has not kept up nearly so well with Mycroft’s language of subtleties.

“Your beloved sounded rather stressed on the phone,” Mycroft dryly remarks, a blatant redirection, and that, Sherlock can translate for the _No_ that it is.  “You may want to keep an eye on him.”

“Funny.”  Sherlock watches him carefully place each item into his suitcase, filling the space in the most efficient possible configuration.  “He said you sounded rather faint.”

“Funny, indeed, though I can see how an unobservant person might make that mistake.”

Sherlock narrows his eyes, firmly reminding himself not to let Mycroft sidetrack him too completely, though it is difficult when an insult to Jim feels like an insult to his very self.  “What’s funny is your blind insistence that he is not what he is.”

“Oh no, dear brother.”  Mycroft slowly straightens, his voice cool and dark.  “The only one making that mistake is you.”

“Marvelously unfounded,” Sherlock sniffs.  “What exactly do you think he is?”

Mycroft at last turns toward Sherlock.  His face looks ridiculous without its second chin, his nose too pronounced, hawkish, but when he lifts an eyebrow, Sherlock can still glimpse steel.  “How did his father die, Sherlock?”  

Sherlock clenches his jaw.  “He was ill.  The question of _why_ you continue to breach his privacy notwithstanding--”

“What was his malady?”

“Medical mystery.  What’s yours?”

Sherlock cannot help but puff up a bit with pride when his brother’s mouth clamps shut, because he knows few achievements more satisfying than turning the tables on Mycroft.  He takes a step into Mycroft’s room, taking his advantage while he's got it.  “Dad has his theory.  No doubt Mummy has one of her own.  I don’t have theories, but I see the options.  So which is it?”  He looks between Mycroft’s eyes, because he can, now.  They stand eye to eye, because Sherlock is no longer a child to distract and discourage.  “Overstressed, insecure, or afflicted?”

Unexpectedly, Mycroft does not insist that he is fine.  He meets Sherlock’s gaze, unfazed.  “Enlighten me,” he says, voice low, “as to what you think entitles you to that answer.”

Sherlock very nearly shouts at him.   _Because it matters to me, you great imbecile._

But words like that are difficult.  There are not good words for this feeling, not in their language.  Their language has many words for cleverness, but very few for caring.  The few words that do suffice sit awkwardly in their mouths, all four of them, Mummy and Dad as much as Mycroft and himself.  It is silently agreed that they are not to put stake in words of love, because in the language of this house, there are few things more disingenuous.  What can be trusted is what can be observed.

So Sherlock glares back at his brother and says, “Make a deduction.”

Mycroft's jaw works for a moment before he closes his eyes, exhaling heavily through his nose, and Sherlock knows that the deduction was long since made.  "Sherlock."

He says nothing more, looking weary, and an unpleasant thought crosses Sherlock's mind.  "You mentioned my...comments, from before," he says hesitantly.  He's always had comments.  It was convenient, as Mycroft's previous weight gain had happened to coincide with the breaking of their brotherly alliance.  It was something with which Mycroft would be incapable of arguing, and so it was a handy dart in Sherlock's modest arsenal.  "That wouldn't...surely it didn't--"

"No," Mycroft says, adamant and immediate, and Sherlock's fingers relax.  "No, I'm afraid my current state is indicative of things well outside your influence."

"The job, then."

"Yes," Mycroft says.  "And no."

Sherlock lowers his voice, intrigued in spite of everything.  "What are they asking you to do?"

He knows it's the wrong question before it has entirely escaped his mouth, and by then something behind Mycroft's gaze is already slamming shut.  "I'm afraid that's classified information."

" _Fine_ ," Sherlock presses before Mycroft can fully turn his back.  "What is _Dad_ asking you to do?"

Mycroft sighs again, put-upon.  He has always been excellent at put-upon.  "If you must know," he says, "he provided the name of a friend in the psychiatric profession, an invitation to call home if I'm in need of an outlet, and, for lack of a better term, a suggested diet."

Sherlock frowns.  "Diet?"

"For lack of a better term," Mycroft repeats.  "Meant, I'm sure, to encourage regular intervals of calorie consumption."  Mycroft has returned to his suitcase.  Multitasking.  Five minutes to departure.  "Quaint, isn't it?  He does try."

"He does," Sherlock agrees.  "That's what he's for."

Mycroft only inclines his head as he zips the suitcase shut, agreeing, but not dismissing.  The two of them spent many years noting all the ways Dad was different from Mummy and themselves, but they have long since learned that there is no wisdom in mistaking those differences for defects.

Leaving the case, Mycroft crosses the room to retrieve his coat.  It’s a posh sort of thing, now, expensive, to go with his posh, expensive suits and his posh, expensive luggage.  “Never mind it, Sherlock.”

“I do mind.”

“Well,” Mycroft says, doing up the last button and going back for his case.  “I mind how willfully flippant you are about Daniel Moriarty’s mysterious _malady_ ,” again he lifts a pointed eyebrow, “but it seems neither of us is prepared to assuage the other’s concerns.”

“You might assuage your own concerns by simply _discontinuing_ your surveillance of him.”

Mycroft smiles, pleasant and insincere.  “No.”  

Sherlock fights the impulse to bristle in response, instead lifting his chin.  “Then I’m sure you won’t mind if I assist Dad in monitoring the progress of your... _diet_.”

Mycroft glares flatly at him, but it lacks conviction.  “And a Happy New Year to you, too.  If you’ll excuse me.”

He hefts up his case and comes for the door, and Sherlock moves aside enough that he couldn’t be accused of blocking passage, but not so much that Mycroft doesn’t have to struggle a bit to get through.  “Until next time.”

Mycroft squeezes past Sherlock with a huff, fixing him with a rather more spirited glower once he’s through.  That is all he contributes before turning on his heel and heading down the stairs, presumably to give their parents a short farewell.  Sherlock briefly laments not having his violin on hand to play Mycroft out with a particularly loathsome Christmas carol.  He files the thought away for next time as he leaves his brother’s doorway (though not without taking a glance about his room, the better to add detail to its double in his palace).

In a few days, Sherlock will be packing a bag of his own and going back to more interesting things.  It is healthy, he supposes, to be reminded that he and Jim do not exist in a vacuum, but sometimes, when the rest of the world becomes too unpleasant and strange, he rather likes to pretend they do.

-

Jim was not waiting in Sherlock’s flat when he arrived, so Sherlock put down his luggage and came upstairs to wait in Jim’s.  He hasn’t sat down, preferring to wander the single room, the layout identical to his own, and scan for bits of new data.  Jim hasn’t made his bed since they left on holiday, and the rumpled sheets still vaguely bear the shape of him.  The pen he used for his frenzy of planning immediately after the phone call lies abandoned on his desk.

Neat, otherwise.  Jim keeps his rooms neat.  Sherlock keeps his rooms cluttered so there will be room for his mind to operate unencumbered; messy outside, tidy within.  He has wondered, but never asked, how Jim’s rooms compare to the quarters of his beast.

Few things tell more about Jim's nature than his flat, not because it reflects precisely who he is, but precisely because it does not.  Since the day he moved in, the walls have remained bare; there are no photographs on his desk, no personal trinkets on his bedside table.  His sheets are plain.  A few scattered writing utensils, a pile of notebooks, and a bookshelf of nonfiction (which includes, to Sherlock's despair, _The Dynamics of Combustion_ by a certain ‘M.L. Holmes’) at least betray that a student makes his home here, but it could be any student, any empty advertisement for the university flats.  It is precisely how Jim, who chooses to be many people, who occasionally likes to be forgotten, would have it. 

But Sherlock has explored this flat, rummaging through the drawers, peeking in the closet and under the bed, because exploring is what he does, and because Jim has let him.  It’s more a gift than a game.  Often Jim has spent the time lounging on the mattress with a textbook, alert but unconcerned, while Sherlock has familiarized himself with his space.

So Sherlock knows about the collection of fairy tales Jim keeps tucked away in an old suitcase under his bed, well-loved and withering.  He knows about the small mountain of used pocket notepads in the desk's bottom left drawer, every page scribbled with fragments of thoughts and ideas and lists, of despondent physics equations and explosions of boldfaced anger.  He knows about the shoe box at the very back corner of the closet shelf.

And Sherlock has spent nights here before, either awake and debating or unexpectedly asleep, and so he knows about the phosphorescent paint Jim took to the ceiling, surely over the course of days, weeks.  The first time he laid eyes upon the painted galaxy that sprawls across Jim's ceiling, visible only in the dark by its subdued glow, Sherlock thinks he may have trailed off mid-sentence.  At the time, Jim glanced up at the silence, followed Sherlock's gaze, and only smiled a bit before prompting him to go on.

So many truths of Jim exist in this flat.  It is intensely private, carefully nondescript, unless one is allowed to come close.  For those allowed close enough - that is to say, for Sherlock - it contains passion, and madness, and violence, and moments of sharply unexpected beauty.   Jim does not allow the surface of his flat to reflect the smallest detail about who he is, what he is, but Sherlock knows where to find him here.

When a key turns in the lock, Sherlock is sitting comfortably cross-legged at the foot of Jim's bed, his back against the wall and his mother's book open in his lap, ignoring the text (which he cannot even glimpse without hearing the author's voice, of which he has heard quite enough in the last couple of weeks) and focusing on the little notes Jim has penned in the margins.  He hasn't been at it for more than a quarter of an hour, but already he's caught himself smiling a couple of times.  It is a comfort to see proof that he is not the only one who gets into involved conversations and heated arguments with the books he reads.

At the sound, Sherlock glances up, then maneuvers to his feet to return the book to its place, straightening just as the door swings open.

Making eye contact with Jim feels like breathing again.  In the space of a second, Sherlock drinks in the whole of him - haircut enhancing his eyes, sleep deprivation in his face, anxiety in his fingernails, success in his stride - and allows Jim to do the same.

"Late," Sherlock chides.

"Early," Jim accuses.

Jim reaches behind himself to lock the door without moving his gaze, and he drops his bag carelessly to the floor.  He comes forward.  As he does, Sherlock identifies an additional detail in Jim's face and limbs and stride: deep and consuming relief.

Sometimes, Jim will ask for touch, usually with a silently outstretched hand; other times, he will simply take it, always remaining minutely tense for a few seconds after, then relaxing when he is not pushed away.  Today, Jim doesn't stop at a polite distance, instead bypassing it entirely and walking directly into Sherlock, pressing his forehead into the crook of his neck and exhaling, as if he’s been waiting the entire holiday to pick up where they left off at the train station.

It has been two weeks, two days, and seven hours since he and Jim were last in the same room.  Sherlock has been keenly aware of every second of it.  It is hardly a decision to wrap his arm around Jim’s shoulders and keep him, quietly echoing his release of breath.

Jim’s voice is tired, but amused.  “Miss me?”

Unashamed, Sherlock replies, “Yes.”

He can feel Jim’s smile, the crinkling of his eyes, without having to look.  Jim’s hands lift, and adjust, and come to rest at Sherlock’s spine.  The tension slides slowly from Jim’s back, and his weight sinks forward.  Sherlock takes it.

This doesn’t come naturally to either of them, even as other people seem to do it without a second thought.  Reuniting, and expressing that they are glad of the reunion, and an embrace.  Jim’s arms seem unsure where to place themselves, only certain that they want to be around him in some fashion.  If Sherlock thinks about it for more than a moment, it feels deeply strange.  But if he does not think about it, he can close his eyes, exhale, and be warm.

“See you survived your trials,” Jim murmurs into his clavicle.  “Did you get him to choke down a biscuit?”

Sherlock looks at the floor, too content to frown.  “Work in progress.”  There is residual tension in Jim’s shoulders under Sherlock’s arm, though it seems to be slowly fading.  “I see you survived yours.”

With an odd note of melancholy, Jim mumbles, “Always do.”

Drained.  That is the word for him now, the word for what he was on the phone, for what he’s been since he walked in.  It seems less physical than mental, perhaps emotional.  To a degree, Sherlock imagines it could be explained by the return to his childhood home, to smells and places and people Jim perhaps associates with pain, but there is something acute to it now, something new.

"You're not mourning him," Sherlock says slowly, reading him aloud.

Jim shakes his head minutely, keeping his face firmly hidden in the crook of Sherlock's neck.  "Nothing new to mourn."

It's an interesting statement, and Sherlock files it away to examine later, when he's not busy analyzing what is right in front of him.  "But you're feeling something.  Not about him.  And not about your mother, though she is more closely connected.  Divorcee, as you’ve mentioned, long since out of the picture, estranged from you and likely from him, or they would have called her first, but she was still a means to something.  There was a reason you needed her there, but out of the way."  Jim breathes against him while he puts it together.  "Something else was there, something she brought with her.  Something that does matter to you."

Nothing, and Sherlock keeps on.  "But you were busy.  It would have fallen to you to manage the event, ensure that it ran smoothly, that everyone saw only what you wanted them to see - you wouldn't have it any other way, of course, with your skill set and near-pathological need for control--"

"Excuse you."

"--so there wouldn't have been time to process the importance of that element, would there?  Not in front of anyone who would attend Daniel Moriarty’s funeral, certainly not on a train full of strangers, but now--"

Jim's fingers come to rest on his lips, stopping his mouth.  "Shhhh."

Sherlock plucks Jim's hand away and closes his fingers around it. "But I _am_ right."

"Of course you're right, you ninny.  Deduce me later."

Sherlock smiles.  "Oh, but there's so much to deduce now."

"I _will_ kiss you to shut you up, don't think I won't, and we both know you don't like that."

Sherlock rolls his eyes, but has mercy, letting the mystery of Jim's important thing go for the time being, because it is the first time Jim has outright acknowledged that he understands.  Or, at least, that he is willing to try.  A novel sensation, and a pleasant one.  Sherlock rests his chin more comfortably on top of Jim's head, inspiring a satisfying grumble about his height.  For the sake of argument, he points out, "I’ve never claimed to dislike it."

"Just don't want it," Jim amends, leaning on him like he could go to sleep there.

Sherlock considers, then shakes his head and corrects, "Just don't need it."

Jim hums, lazily patting Sherlock's ribs.  "Good for you, love.  We're hopeless enough, all of us.  Need so many things, every day, over and over and _over_.  Nice to have something to cross off the list."

"Like the timely removal of an unsavory individual," Sherlock smiles.

"Like a good snog," Jim agrees.  "Hateful, isn't it?  Needing things."

His voice is beginning to drift again, melancholy creeping through.  In Sherlock’s hand, Jim’s fingers are dry from the cold, the nails recently chewed.  Softer, Sherlock asks, “What do you need?”

“I need,” Jim mumbles, “to sleep for approximately eighteen hours, beginning very, very soon.  And you, my dear, need to go back to your flat and locate your surprise.”

When Sherlock pulls back enough to look at Jim curiously, Jim gives him a reproachful tilt of the head.  “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten now, after all your nagging?”

Oh.   _Oh._

Jim is smiling at him now, tired and fond.  Elated, Sherlock grips him by the shoulders and presses a firm kiss to his forehead, earning a surprised laugh, then begins to turn on his heel to do exactly as prescribed, but Jim catches his hand before he can get far.  He tugs Sherlock back around to look him seriously in the eye.  “Take your time with it,” he softly instructs.  “I did.”

Sherlock squeezes his hand back, adrenaline and deep fondness flooding through his chest and lungs and limbs.  “I will.”

Jim drops a kiss on Sherlock’s knuckles and lets go.  “Off you pop.”

Sherlock’s mind is already leagues ahead, narrowing down the possible locations of his gift, the possible methods of engineering a delayed murder like this, the possible resources he can tap to begin his process.  “I’ll be back shortly with a conclusion.”

“Not _that_ shortly.”

“I accept your challenge.”

Jim smiles, shaking his head.  “Have fun.”

Sherlock smiles back as he turns away.  “Oh, yes.”

Jim waves him off, and Sherlock needs no further prompting to hurry back to his flat, re-energized at last.  He has an autopsy report to read, and finally, _finally_ , a proper murder to solve.

-

Sherlock gets lost.  Beautifully, brilliantly lost.

The autopsy is so _clean_.  The death is innocuous, easily attributable to any number of external factors.  Daniel Moriarty had smoke-stained lungs and an overworked liver to begin with, not to mention a family history rife with heart disease and an apparent disinclination to attend his yearly check-ups.  No surprise to anyone when he started experiencing health troubles two and a half years ago, and therefore no surprise when the symptoms worsened, or when they ultimately took his life.  He died during their last week of class before winter break; Sherlock saw Jim for the better part of every day that week, not that it matters, because Jim said himself long ago that this was always meant to be a long game.

A long game, a mad, _glorious_ game, in which Jim somehow engineered a death by natural causes.  No one would suspect foul play after such a lengthy and predictable decline, and it happened at a time when Jim had been far away for months.  A perfect murder.

Everything else falls by the wayside as Sherlock delves into his mystery, uncovering it bit by bit.  He loses track of the hour, of the day, of his meals and other bodily requirements, not leaving his work until his biological needs become quite urgent.  Occasionally he has started getting an odd, nagging sense of a missed detail, something overlooked, but then, he is also not entirely sure how long he has been awake.

By the time he seizes upon a strong theory and blinks up at his calendar, he wonders that the last week of the holiday has nearly passed.  Then he wonders why that should feel so strange.

It takes him a moment, but then it hits him.  He is back on campus, nearly a week has passed since their reunion, and he has not heard a word from Jim.  
  
Frowning, Sherlock thinks back, trying to determine whether at any point Jim has been in this room, with Sherlock perhaps too distracted to consciously take note, but a glance around the flat tells him that no one has come or gone but himself.  Odd, because even if Jim has been giving him space to work out the autopsy report, Jim likes watching him work.  Surely he would have picked the lock at some point, even if just to perch on Sherlock's bed and read, or sketch, or observe.  
  
Sherlock would like to think that he is not so self-absorbed as to assume something is wrong if Jim is opting to go about his business in his own flat or elsewhere.  But there is still that tiny tug at the back of his mind, the missed detail, the silent urge.   _Notice.  Notice.  Notice._  
  
Closing his eyes, he summons his palace-bedroom.  It takes a bit of effort to bring it fully into being, new to the process as he still is, but he manages it.  Once there, he kneels by the third floorboard and pries it up, pulling out the locked box.  Unlock, open, search, and he pulls out a letter - not a real letter, nothing he ever picked up from the post as a boy, but that is how the pieces of Jim manifest in this corner of his palace.  Jim is letters.  Letters are the first thing Jim ever was to him.

The one in Sherlock's hand bears a rough sketch of the Jim he spoke to a week ago, and next to it a list of minor details of which he took note.  The haircut, the stride, the warmth of his hands against his spine.  The noticeable thickening of his accent after, presumably, enough time spent among like-tongued family members to bring it out.  His chewed fingernails--  
  
Sherlock pauses.  He lifts the page closer, studying his mental sketch of Jim, zooming in on that detail.  Chewed nails.  Jim was already starting on them when they parted ways before Christmas, but they didn't look like the sketch in Sherlock's hand.  In the sketch, they are worse.

When they last saw each other, Jim was worse.

Sherlock closes his eyes.  When he opens them again, he is back in his flat, gripped with an unusual sense of foreboding, along with an urgent need to locate Jim.  He stands quickly, staggers as his body reminds him of much sitting and little sleep, and then shakes off the spell and leaves his flat for Jim’s, taking the stairs two at a time.

-

Jim is many things, many brilliant things.  He is ruthlessly clever; he is charming.  He is confident and mischievous, irreverent and bold.  He is countless things.  But, as Sherlock knows by virtue of being himself, one can be many brilliant things, and still not be _well_.

Sherlock picks Jim’s lock and opens the door to chaos.  The flat is torn apart, littered with ripped-up textbooks and overturned furniture and broken glass, the latter of which is the likely culprit for the blood smeared on the bedside table and dried in a trail down Jim’s forearm from his palm.  He does not seem to have noticed.  He is preoccupied with an enormous mathematical formula that he is scrawling across the expanse of the north wall, having already exhausted every centimeter of wall space to the west.

It all speaks volumes.  Wide-eyed, realizing, Sherlock silently names it, _Beast_.

He has no frame of reference to respond to this outside his own experience of broken hard drives, no hidden nook of knowledge in his palace, but he does not like the sight of Jim’s blood.  Not on his palm, not on his arm, not on the fingers he has bitten down to the quick.  He starts there.

He approaches slowly.  “Jim.”

Jim falters, just for a moment, as though he’s going to answer, but then frowns and shakes his head.  He continues writing.  He has not slept in a day or two, going by the shadows in his face.  Likely hasn’t eaten, or drunk.  Quietly dismayed at himself for allowing this to progress so far - for being selfish, for being obtuse, for taking Jim’s puzzle and running, for forgetting him - Sherlock catches Jim’s right hand at the wrist as it moves toward his mouth for more abuse, grabbing his left to stop his scrawling.  “Jim, you--”

His grasp at words is cut off when Jim lets out an animal howl and thrashes in his grip, catching Sherlock off guard and knocking him backward to crash against the adjacent wall.  Sherlock has barely gasped in his lost breath when the weight of Jim’s body has shoved him back into the wall, one forearm pressing into his throat.

Jim’s eyes are wild.  They are angry, and lost, and deeply frightened.  “ _Don’t you do that!_ ” he shouts in Sherlock’s face, trembling, teeth bared.  “Don’t you _ever fucking do that_ to me.  Don’t you _ever!_ ”

Frightened.  Sherlock frightened him.  Abruptly he remembers Jim at seventeen, hiding hand-shaped bruises under his too-long sleeves, and he grimaces.  Stupid, stupid.  He will apologize, when Jim again lets him breathe.  He lifts his hands, not to touch, only to surrender.

Just as abruptly as his outburst, Jim blinks, then spins away from him, leaving Sherlock to cough his way to a replenished air supply.  Once the spots are no longer swimming in front of his eyes, he finds that Jim has returned to his defacing of the wall, his pace and breath faster, sharper.

Absently rubbing his throat, Sherlock reevaluates.  He leaves Jim at the wall and fetches the first-aid kit and, as an afterthought, a clean set of clothes that he doesn't think Jim would find objectionable.  Setting the folded pile aside for the moment, he positions himself at a respectful distance this time, within the bounds of Jim's peripheral vision.

Jim continues writing.  "Getting sloppy," he mutters, because he is, the numbers growing steadily less legible as they go down, as Jim's body pleads exhaustion, as the cut on his palm slowly dries and goes stiff.  Likely his fingers have grown sore and clumsy as well, the cuticles ripped and ragged.

Sherlock keeps his distance, taking a moment to study the formula covering a wall and a half of Jim’s flat.  Even taking his time, he cannot make sense of it.  "What are you calculating?"

"Patterns," Jim says immediately.

“Patterns of what?”

“Just patterns.”  He pauses, rereading the last equation he wrote, taking quiet, shallow breaths and idly chewing on a raw nail of his free hand, before taking the marker back to the wall.  “They’re everywhere, you know, natural patterns, political patterns, social patterns, this--” he shudders through an unsteady laugh, “--this is a pattern.  You’re one, I’m one, all we do is repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat…”

He seems to get stuck on the word, trailing off into a mumble while the numbers he’s writing turn into words: _repeat repeat repeat repeat_.  It takes him a moment to notice, and he reels like the wall has slapped him.  “Oh, no.  No, no, no, no.”  His breath grows heavier, and he snaps the marker in two, the jagged plastic digging another cut into his palm, and then pitches the pieces across the room.  “Shit _fucking_ \--God!”

His body seems to be preparing to hyperventilate, and Sherlock takes it as a cue.  He crosses the room to Jim in long, slow strides.  “Jim.  I’m going to touch you, if you’ll allow it.  Will you?”

"What did I _fucking say?_ " Jim bites out, half a second from a murmur to a shout.  He shies away from Sherlock as though he has touched him, even though Sherlock's hands haven't left his sides.  His eyes squeeze shut, his fingers digging through his hair.  "I just, I just need to quantify it.  If I can just quantify it, it'll stop shouting.  It'll stop.  It'll stop, and I can sleep."  His voice breaks, and his other hand joins the first in his hair in a painful-looking clutch before both hands slide down to cover his face.  From behind his palms, he shakily asks, "Why do you want to touch me?"  
  
Sherlock swallows hard.  Jim is crumbling before his eyes, his very self being overtaken, and being so close to the destruction hollows out Sherlock's chest with something like mourning.  For a brief, bizarre moment he wants to call Mycroft, because he would know how to manage this, surely he would know.  Then he dismisses the thought, because he knows Jim, and so he knows what a deep betrayal it would be to bring a second pair of eyes to this moment.  He takes a breath.  The first step is to answer the question.  "I'd like to examine your left hand."  
  
" _Fuck_ my left hand!" Jim snarls, his fist a blur as he drives it hard and fast into the wall, his knuckles splitting against the final scrawled _repeat_.  He turns away, dropping his face into his hands again, pacing away.  Brokenly, he mumbles, "You're not supposed to be here."  
  
Hiding.  That's what he's doing.  This is not only a...a break, of some sort, Sherlock realizes, but shame.  A shame Sherlock knows well, to which he had somehow thought Jim might be impervious.  The shame of revealing that he is less than he pretends to be.

"Jim," he says softly.  "I know what you are, and what you're not.  What defines you, and what does not."  Jim's fingers rake back through his hair, but he keeps his face turned away, his hands minutely shaking.  "This moment is only a moment.  And if, in this moment, what you need is to quantify, then I'd like to help you quantify."  Before he can reconsider it, he holds out a hand toward Jim, palm up, inviting him the way Jim has invited him so many times.  It's a strangely vulnerable feeling, standing there with an empty, outstretched hand, waiting.  "I imagine it's becoming increasingly difficult to write."  
  
Jim's silence seems to stretch into centuries.  Then, unsteadily and very quietly, "Only the one."  
  
"Yes."  
  
Pulling in a few breaths through his nose, rocking his upper body slightly for a moment, Jim swallows hard and slowly, guardedly gives Sherlock his hand.  
  
Sherlock cradles it carefully in his own.  "Thank you."  Jim's eyes remain low and restless, and he doesn't reply.  
  
Turning Jim's palm up, Sherlock studies the cut crossing it.  Accidental, clotting well enough, aggravated from gripping the marker too tightly.  The new one is shallow, bleeding a bit but otherwise nothing to worry about.  A brief examination of his knuckles shows a bit of splitting, a bit more blood, but nothing broken.  Sherlock digs into the first-aid kit with his other hand and sees to the injuries, cleaning them with disinfectant (Jim's rate of breath increases with the sting, but he doesn't pull away) and efficiently wrapping the hand while Jim's pulse races out of control under his fingers.  Jim makes a clear effort to hold still while he works, and watching it seems to settle him a bit, at least enough that instead of trying to wander away when Sherlock has finished, he bows his head.

“It won’t stop,” he says.  His voice cracks, and he thumps his fists against his temples once, twice.  “It never _stops_.”

Sherlock closes his eyes.  “I know,” he says, because he does, God, he does.

Jim takes a shaking breath, his voice beginning at a whisper and undergoing a rapid crescendo into a shout.  “I never stop seeing...everything, all the stupid, _boring_ patterns, just...cycling, _cycling_ , what’s the fucking _point_?!”  He rips himself away from Sherlock to hurl his alarm clock off the end table and into the wall.  When Sherlock reels him back in, he’s breathing through his teeth, pounding fists into Sherlock’s shoulders, muffling a wordless scream into Sherlock’s chest.  It’s a real scream, throat-ripping and primal, and Sherlock holds on to Jim’s arms through it, keeping him from sagging to the floor once his lungs have emptied.

“I know,” Sherlock quietly repeats.  “I know.”

“No,” Jim mumbles, shaking his head without lifting it, further mussing his hair against Sherlock’s shirt.  “No, you see details, they’re what drive you mad, little tiny details, not this.  Not--” he takes a broken breath but keeps his momentum, the pace of his words gathering speed.  “I can see it, Sherlock.  Everything, it’s connected, this moment--this,” he gestures aggressively at the two of them, “this touches everything else, like a, like a spiderweb, and I can see it.  You breathe, and it sets off another pattern, all the way down the line, and I know exactly what’s down that line, _every last line_ , and it never changes, and I want to stop someone’s _heart_ , anyone's, _mine_ , just so _one fucking line_ gets cut--” he goes quiet and just shudders against Sherlock for a moment.  In barely a voice, he pleads, “Make it stop, Sherlock.”  He presses his forehead harder into Sherlock’s sternum.  “Please.”

The plea is an unexpected blade in Sherlock’s gut, and he swallows hard, squeezing Jim’s arms.  “Is there anything you might take, to--”

“No drugs,” Jim snaps, shaking him a little, and Sherlock leaves the sentence unfinished.

“Then, to start,” he murmurs, “breathe with me.”

Jim makes a sound between a quietly hysterical laugh and a scoff.  “ _Breathe._ ”

“With me,” Sherlock repeats.  He lifts his hands to Jim’s jaw and coaxes his face up so he can look him in the eye, speaking calmly.  He is not good with emotions, but right now, Jim’s emotions are not the problem.  This problem is chemical, biological, and those subjects, he knows.  “You’re showing signs of hypocapnia, and you’re likely experiencing reduced bloodflow to your brain due to increased adrenaline.  Your body requires carbon dioxide.  Let it have what it needs.”  Jim looks back, a study in despair with wet sunken eyes, so far from his usual fearlessness, and it hurts to look back, so Sherlock pulls Jim’s forehead to his own.  They close their eyes.  Moisture hits Sherlock’s thumb, and he carefully brushes it away.  “Breathe with me.”

It takes time, but gradually Jim’s breathing starts to slow, working toward matching Sherlock's.  Under the heel of Sherlock’s palm, his pulse does the same.  The tremble in his muscles begins to lessen.  His hands unclench from the shoulders of Sherlock’s shirt, and his arms wrap loosely around his neck in a weak embrace.  

Sherlock knows this moment, the quiet shift from utter paralysis to a faint, glimmering ability to cope.

“Come to mine,” Sherlock says, relocating his hands more comfortably to Jim’s sides, absently resting his cheek against the side of his head.  “We’ll come back in the morning.”

Jim swallows hard, starting to look back toward the formula.  “It’s not done.”

“No, it isn’t.”  Sherlock takes Jim’s chin and coaxes him to look at him instead of the wall.  “We’ll come back in the morning, and if you choose to finish it then, you will.”

Jim grips Sherlock’s shoulders, anchoring himself, and shakily nods.

They only need to stop once, three quarters of the way down the hall, the change in setting overwhelming to Jim after however long he’s spent confined in his flat with only the company of his overstimulated mind.  He fights it, Sherlock can see him fighting it, before he stops walking and shakes his head.  “I can’t, I--fuck, I have to…”  Sherlock lowers to a knee with him when he abruptly sits down against the wall, drawing up his knees and pressing his face into his arms, giving himself the darkness he needs.  “Can you--”  

He holds out a hand, searching, and Sherlock takes it.  “I’m here.”

Muffled, “I’m sorry, Sherlock, I'm sorry I'm--”

“Don’t be.”

He kneels with him for the couple of minutes it takes for him to adjust, coldly dismissing a passing student who asks if his mate is ‘having a bad trip or something,’ and then standing with him when he can again.  They make it the rest of the way to Sherlock’s flat in silence.  It’s busier on his floor, more foot traffic moving in and out, a party thumping in one of the flats down the hall, and he keeps a protective arm around Jim’s shoulders while he unlocks the door.

Once the door is shut behind them, Jim lets out a long, shaky breath.  He stays tucked to Sherlock’s side for a moment, pressing his eyes into the crook of Sherlock’s neck the way he does when he’s overstrained them, then digs his fingers through his hair and pulls away, beginning to pace a slow circuit of the room.  

“May want to just go about your business,” he mumbles.  “This may take a bit.”

“Is that what you prefer?”

“No, it’s much easier to sort this while you’re fucking staring at me,” Jim snipes, more stressed than anything else, and Sherlock takes the hint.  He fills a glass of water and sets it within Jim’s reach, then retrieves a bit of material he’s been neglecting and settles at his microscope to take down his evening notes, all the while remaining keenly aware of Jim’s footsteps traveling from one end of the flat to the other, of the pace of Jim’s breath.

By the time Sherlock has finished, Jim has slowed a bit, but not stopped.  He’s started absently touching things, skimming his fingertips across the headboard and the light switches and the walls.  Half the water has vanished from his glass.  Mild improvement.  Sherlock swivels his chair slowly around, away from the microscope, facing Jim.

"Why didn't you come here?" he asks quietly, watching him pace.  "If you felt it coming?"

Jim runs his fingers through his hair for the thousandth time.  It's sticking up at all angles, mussed the way his clothes are mussed, as though he has forgotten that he requires daily care and keeping.  "Meant to have it sorted before you noticed.  I’m used to handling it on my own.  He didn’t like it when I...he, he’d try to--”

He abruptly cuts himself off and continues his wandering, idly rubbing his wrist, taking deep, deliberate breaths through his nose, heart-slowing breaths.  His limbs move like they are heavy.  He swallows hard, and his fingers dig restlessly through his hair again.  "Tell me about the autopsy report."

Sherlock watches him, choosing his words carefully.  "It was elegant.  What with his hospital visits during his final years of life, there is nothing at all to suggest that he died of anything but natural causes."

"But," Jim prompts, pacing, pacing.

"But," Sherlock concedes, "it's a bit too neat, isn't it, the perfect, incrementally steady decline of his health over two years and five months.  That is how long you were dosing him, isn't it?"

"Seven," Jim mutters immediately, pressing his tattered nails into his palms, presumably to keep them away from his mouth.  "Two years and seven.  First doses were too low to be consequential."

"For a man of his size, which you hadn't foreseen," Sherlock points out, and Jim lets out a long breath.  "Because you didn't use just any poison, did you?  It would have to be untraceable.  You would have to be certain of it.  That level of certainty can only be gained by controlled experimentation.  And your test subject was large indeed, but not quite that large."

"Please," Jim breathes, his steps slowing, and Sherlock cuts to the conclusion.

"Botulinium."  He watches, quietly triumphant, when Jim finally comes to a stop.  He stands suspended, even his breathing paused, while Sherlock concludes, "Daniel Moriarty was your intended victim all along.  Our friend, Carl Powers, was merely a test.  He was preparation for a much longer game, because it couldn’t be sudden like Powers, not this time.  It would be too easy to draw a line between a father’s death and a son’s motive.”  Jim is minutely nodding, breathing again, shallowly.  “So you drew it out.  You increased his dosage gradually, let the doctors wonder at his symptoms, let them run their tests and find nothing but the red flags he already displayed.  You let them prescribe medications, and then you tampered with them, and then you left for university.  Your alibi.  The amounts you slipped in would have been carefully measured to delay the final result, familiar with its chemical interactions as you were by then.  So it was that you went about your business, a blameless student, and let him poison himself until his body gave out.”  Jim’s eyes slip shut, his face turning up, and Sherlock concludes, “He dies.  The doctors wonder.  You win.”

All the air rushes shakily out of Jim, and he spins on his heel and comes directly to Sherlock, lifting both of Sherlock's hands, kissing the knuckles of both and holding them to his forehead.  "Oh, bless you.  Bless you.  You're perfect.  You're real.  Sherlock Holmes."  Another deep, deliberate breath, his eyes screwing shut against the backs of Sherlock's fingers.  Barely audible under his breath, he whispers, "God, never leave me."

Understanding aches in Sherlock's chest, and he turns his hands to hold onto Jim's in turn.  "How could I?" he murmurs back.  "I am you."

Jim shudders out something that is not quite a laugh, not quite a sob, squeezing Sherlock's hands like they are keeping his heart beating.  His voice is smiling, unsteady, as he shakes his head.  "How dare you."

Sherlock huffs a laugh, which Jim echoes wetly, his breath seeming to come easier even as he sways a bit on his feet.  "How long since you've slept?"

Jim groans, pressing his closed eyes against Sherlock's fingers.  "Lost track."

"Do you think you can?"

"Maybe.  Who knows."  He lowers Sherlock's hands, absently sweeping his thumbs over them.  "May be back up wearing a hole in your floor in an hour."

"The floor has endured worse."  Jim looks curiously at him, and Sherlock shrugs.  "Ideas.  They tend to arrive at inopportune moments.  They seem to be overfond of the dead of night."

"The witching hour," Jim murmurs, smiling a bit.  "A good time for ideas."  Sherlock hums agreement, and Jim considers the mattress.  "I'll have the wall, if you don't mind."

It says so much of Jim in this moment, the quiet willingness to try, and Sherlock tells him so with a reassuring squeeze of his fingers.  "By all means."  

Sherlock loosens his grip, and Jim hides his face in Sherlock's hair for one deep breath, in and out, then lets go of his hands so Sherlock can fish some spare sleep-clothes out of his dresser.  He holds them up, and Jim accepts them, taking a few steps away and stripping off his shirt.  Sherlock busies himself with fetching a second pillow from the closet while Jim changes.  By the time he’s turned back around, Jim is maneuvering into his too-long sweatpants, muttering something resembling _bloody long-limbed bastard_ , and Sherlock smiles a bit, encouraged.

There were, of course, two primary implications of Jim’s claiming of the wall.  The first, clearly, was that he was ready to attempt to rest.  The second was that he did not expect to have the mattress to himself.

Sherlock is fairly certain that not so long ago, such an assumption would have sent tension buzzing through his nerves, but as Jim settles in facing the wall, looking remarkably small as he curls around Sherlock’s pillow (Sherlock had no illusions that he was fetching the spare for anyone but himself), all Sherlock feels is a bit of curiosity about how the both of them will fit comfortably on his slab of mattress, and a bit of relief that Jim’s beast seems to at last be retreating back into its cage.

Sherlock proceeds with his nighttime routine, returning his petri dish to its place, changing into his own pajamas, washing and brushing as necessary at the sink.  Jim has not moved a muscle in the meantime, but he is awake, listening.  He remains still while Sherlock slots himself into the empty space behind him.  They pause, evaluating.

Sharing a bed is something Sherlock has not done since he was very small, when he’d now and then come crying to Mycroft about how everyone was _wrong_ and he was _right_ and they _didn’t believe him_ , and Mycroft would distract him with pirate stories until he drifted to sleep.  As such, he associates it vaguely with being comforted, a sensation that is warring with his general preference not to be touched.  Both points feel rather moot, regardless; Sherlock is not a child, Jim is not his brother, and the rules of touch are different when it’s the two of them.  Everything is different when it’s the two of them.

Jim neither curls out of the way nor spreads into Sherlock’s space, but stays exactly where he is, facing the wall, remnants of anxious energy tightening his back.  He won’t sleep in this state, and Sherlock won’t sleep as a result, too aware of too many things.  Beyond chemical means, Sherlock has few tools at his disposal to induce sleep; he has never been a purveyor of calming comforts, never been a teller of tales.  The only gift that he knows Jim will always welcome is the same gift that Sherlock will always welcome from Jim, and that is information.  Personal information, pieces of themselves, have always been their medium of exchange.  To tell Jim a secret is to present him with gold.

Watching Jim’s stiff spine a moment longer, Sherlock has a thought.  He murmurs across the centimeters, “Close your eyes.”

The shift of Jim’s focus seems to shift the air itself.  “Why?”

Sherlock whispers back, “Trust me.”

A rare request.  Not a small request.  The muscles in Jim’s neck shift minutely as he swallows, and then he nods.  Presumably, he complies.

“You wanted to know about the palace,” Sherlock says, and Jim’s breath slowly pulls in.  “It’s still largely under construction.  But if you like, I could give you a tour.”

Jim exhales, smile-shaped.  “I’d be honored.”

Closing his own eyes, Sherlock retreats inside.  The bones of his palace begin to rise around him.  Jim is and is not there with him; it takes only a bit of effort to imagine a hand in his, a set of footsteps following his own.  He does not yet know how Jim fits in his palace, not in any form but that of a letter, and so he knows that if he turns to look at him, there will be nothing there.  In the world, the real one, he reaches forward, then pauses, his hand hovering at Jim’s shoulder.  “May I?”

“Mm-hm.”

Sherlock brings his hand to rest on Jim’s shoulder, his forearm pressed lightly to Jim’s bicep, the better not to wander too deeply into his palace and leave him behind.  They lie there in silence while Sherlock fully immerses himself, their breath slowly syncing.

"Where are we?" Jim asks, and his voice is right next to Sherlock and everywhere else, murmuring in from the walls, whispering in the air.  "Describe it to me."

Looking about his entryway, Sherlock quietly begins, “We’re in a child’s bedroom.  Not a young child, not anymore.  Approximately three by four meters, medium light oak floorboards, the third one loose.  Ghastly blue wallpaper.  Vaguely nautical, but not at all worthy of a young pirate king.”  Jim huffs a laugh, shifting on the pillow, carefully not dislodging Sherlock’s hand.  “Twin bed against the east wall, desk against the south.  Cluttered.  A well-used chemistry set takes up the left half, with the sorts of stains one might expect on all surfaces within a meter radius.  Plus one on the opposite wall.”

“Our young pirate king sounds like quite the ambitious scientist,” Jim murmurs knowingly.  “What's it smell like?”

Sherlock considers.  “Wood.  Laundry detergent.  After a certain chemical mishap, not unrelated to the stain outside the radius, it has also smelt very faintly of smoke.”

“What's under the third floorboard?”

The right question, always the right questions.  “In time.”

He leads Jim slowly through the rooms and corridors he’s constructed so far, his murmured descriptions growing increasingly detailed for Jim’s sake.  It's a good exercise, stimulating his memory even as the remaining tension in Jim's back drains away, as Jim’s voice grows lower and softer and less articulate, as Sherlock carefully shifts the focus to the minutia of building and organizing each bit of data, the part Jim would find less stimulating, until the questions slow to a stop.

He is deep in the palace, deeper than he has ever gone, and it takes a bit of doing to work his way back to his bedroom, then to allow it to slowly fade into the sounds and smells of his university flat.  It's a disorienting process, and he latches on to Jim's breath as an anchor.  It is slow and even at last, resting-pace, and it brings Sherlock back into the world enough to open his eyes in the dark.

They have hardly moved, Jim still facing the wall with Sherlock's hand on his shoulder, the only point of contact across a modest breath of space.  Somewhere along the way, Jim reached back for him, crossing his own chest and curling his fingers loosely around Sherlock's.  Whenever that happened, Sherlock missed it entirely.  Tentatively, he runs the pad of his thumb a centimeter along one of Jim's mutilated fingernails.  
  
Empathy.  It has never been one of his strong points, but he is beginning to wonder if that is only because he was misunderstanding what it meant.  True enough, there are things he doesn’t understand about this.  He does not have a beast; he has a hard drive.  But he understands the root of it.  He has felt the persistent gnawing at his brain stem, the walls pressing toward him, the scalding resentment toward a world that saw fit to house him when he clearly belonged elsewhere.  
  
His madness and Jim's madness do not take the same shape, but they are made of the same substance.  The same touch can shatter them into the same jagged pieces.  Lying here, watching the dark, tangled shape of their fingers, he cannot define empathy in any terms but those.  
  
By those terms, he is capable of empathy.  And, perhaps, he has managed to be what was needed.  Rarer still, from the moment he entered Jim's flat, he deeply, desperately _wanted_ to be what was needed.  It was not to show off, and it was not a game.  It was only looking after his friend.  His best, and oldest, and only friend.  
  
Sherlock leaves his hand where it is and settles back into the spare pillow.  He closes his eyes.  
  
He dreams of spiderwebs, unbreaking, tearing at his nails like teeth as they pull him steadily to shore.  
  
-

When Sherlock wakes - at a surprisingly late hour, at least until he remembers that Jim wasn’t the only one who hadn’t slept in some time - there is an empty space next to him, and his shower is running.  He lies there for a moment, listening to the splash patterns marking Jim’s shower routine, gazing idly at the indent in the mattress that tells the story of Jim’s sleep.  He certainly would have foregone sleep long enough in his manic state that his body’s exhaustion would be inevitable; he clearly spent at least sixty percent of his night in the same position in which Sherlock had left him, curled up facing the wall (and, between that and yesterday's frenzy of calculations, very likely sporting a crick in his neck on the left side today).  Approximately twenty-five percent of the night saw him on the opposite side, facing Sherlock, generally while Sherlock was facing away.  Allowing five percent for repositioning, the remaining ten percent...ah.  That would explain the clothing fibers on Sherlock’s sleeve, the strand of straight dark hair on the corner of his pillow, and the vague recollection of his arm falling asleep under a weight.

He remembers very little of the night, but after a moment of consideration, he thinks he may remember that.  Just a glimpse of consciousness between circadian cycles, dim awareness of being curled around something warm and solid and breathing softly against his clavicle, of being a bit too flushed with the shared heat, but otherwise deeply content.  Only a glimpse.

Sherlock takes a moment longer for his brief lie-in, then gets up to see to his experiment.

Jim emerges fully dressed in the change of clothes Sherlock brought for him, his hair freshly toweled but damp, his eyes and breath and gait belonging wholly to himself.  A glance tells Sherlock that Jim has regained a manageable chemical balance, such as it is, and that he does not want to talk about yesterday.  It also tells him that Jim is, sure enough, holding his left shoulder a bit more stiffly than his right.  

“Terrible water pressure in that thing,” Jim greets him.  “Whoever approved it should be waterboarded.  Learn a thing or two.”

Eye on his microscope, Sherlock lifts a hand and beckons.  When Jim is close enough, leaning curiously over the petri dish, Sherlock reaches behind him and presses his fingers into Jim’s levator scapulae, kneading the stiff muscle and making Jim wince and grunt.  His skin is still slightly damp from his hair, and he smells of Sherlock's soap and shampoo.  “Clever you,” he mutters, but doesn’t pull away, leaning a bit into Sherlock, right hand on the back of his chair.

After studying the contents of the petri dish for a bit, breath slightly labored under Sherlock’s ministrations, Jim frowns.  “The humidity level is atrocious for gathering proper data on this material.”

“My last attempt to create the appropriate environment for this experiment very nearly got me expelled from the flats,” Sherlock mumbles, scrawling a note with his free hand.  “I was threatened with a flatmate.  I’m making do.”

“You shouldn’t have to,” Jim says, scandalized.  “Jesus, we’re not without resources, here.  I’ll get you something.”

Sherlock doesn’t reply, but does press soothingly into the aggravated muscle until Jim sighs, then does it once more before letting go.  “Alternating application of heat and cold will accelerate its improvement.”

“My compliments, Doctor.”

That brings something to mind.  “Speaking of.”  Sherlock holds out his hand.

“It’s fine.”

Sherlock doesn’t lower his hand.  He’s quite certain he can hear Jim’s eyes rolling, but after a beat, Jim lays his hand on top of Sherlock’s, and Sherlock leans back from the microscope so he can study the progress of Jim’s palm and knuckles.  They seem to be healing nicely now that they have been properly treated.

“Range of motion?” Sherlock asks.

Jim wiggles his fingers, then turns his wrist to close them around Sherlock’s hand.  He lifts it and presses a kiss to his knuckles.  “Let’s go out for breakfast.  Host’s choice.  Anywhere but the fucking University Centre.”

Sherlock translates: _I don’t want to go back yet._  He stands, but before he can take a step, Jim has reached up and caught his chin in his fingers.  Blinking at him, Sherlock allows his head to be tilted up and a bit to one side, then the other, and then he remembers a forearm across his throat and realizes why Jim is so interested in the state of his neck.

He plucks Jim's hand away from his face, giving it a firm squeeze.  "Perhaps the diner at Lion Yard," he suggests.

Jim only looks at him a moment, and for the span of that moment he is exactly the boy he was years ago at London Swimming Pool, carefully guarded, quietly incredulous that Sherlock has chosen not to reject him.  Then he seems to remember himself, and he nods.  A smirk flickers across his face, as though he is unsure whether he can maintain it.  “If you’re quick about it, we may even be done by dinner.”

“Oh, shut up.”

They commandeer a booth by the diner window, Sherlock talking through the equipment he would require to create the ideal conditions for his most recent experiments, occasionally remembering to take a bite of his toast, while Jim shoots off questions about the specifics with his mouth full of egg as he drowns his oatcakes in golden syrup.  Pointless, his questions, as any equipment of the sort would be exorbitantly expensive for either of them, but Sherlock answers anyway, simply relieved to be able to talk with him again.

It isn’t long before they reach a lull, and Sherlock seizes it before Jim can read his intention and rob him of eye contact.  This matters, because it is not only curiosity driving him anymore, but concern.  A variation on the concern that led him to corner his brother in his bedroom, to nearly shout at him.  He does not want to shout at Jim, because what he and Jim are is so very different from what he and Mycroft are.

Holding Jim’s gaze, he quietly asks, “What woke it?”

Jim’s face flickers the way it does sometimes, microexpressions fighting for dominance before being smothered into a perfectly unreadable mask.  He takes his time, downing the rest of his tea, pushing his empty plate and cup aside.  He shrugs minutely, noncommittal, clearly not in the mood to talk at length of his beast.  “Doesn’t always need a reason.  Woke up in that state from a dead sleep once.”

He fiddles with his napkin, folding it one way and then the other, while Sherlock watches him.  “But there was a reason this time,” Sherlock says, recalling the little details he’d overlooked in his distraction before.  “Something triggered it.  Something at the funeral.”

He could deduce further, but it would be repetitive at best.  He closes his mouth and waits, and at length, Jim nods.  Licks his lips, opens his mouth, then closes it, instead lifting his hands.  Eyes down, he signs, _I hate that place.  There are rooms I can’t go in because I can’t breathe.  I want to burn it down.  I want to burn everything down._

His signing has improved significantly, his hands just that much more graceful as they flow from sentence to sentence, his jaw tight and his gaze dark.  Slower, he signs, _I hadn’t seen her in ten years._  A beat, his eyes far away, before a rapid blink brings him back.  His signing speeds up again, messier now, more casual.   _Got shouted at.  Mum kept saying she knew I’d done it, somehow.  Killed him, somehow._

Sherlock pulls in a breath.  He lifts his hands.   _Are you in danger?_

Jim gives a curt shake of his head, his lip curling in a tight, bitter smile.   _She thinks I’m the spawn of Satan.  She’d think I had a hand in it whether I had or not.  I’m plenty protected._

Pressing his lips together, Sherlock signs back, _If at some point you are in need of endorsement, I will provide._

Jim’s eyebrows go up, and his mouth twitches into a smile, warm and deeply fond.  In his own voice, he softly says, “I know.”  Then, with a twinkle in his eye and an impressed upturn in his voice, “That’s a bit naughty, for you.  I must be a _terrible_ influence.”

Sherlock rolls his eyes.  “Abyssmal.”

Jim huffs a laugh.  He holds out a hand over the table, palm up.  Sherlock takes it.  They hold tight.

“Forgive me,” Sherlock says, quieter, “for my neglect.”

“Not your job to look after me,” Jim reminds him.  “You were doing important work.  You’d been ever so patient.”

“An important distraction, you mean.”

“Oh, no.”  Jim runs his thumb over Sherlock’s fingers, seeming to be in no hurry to let go.  “If you think I wouldn’t have had that report waiting for you with a big red bow on it no matter the circumstances, I’m _offended._ ”

Sherlock smiles.  “I would expect no less.”

“I should fucking hope not.”

They are both still smiling when the server comes to take their plates, and when she brings the bill, Jim snatches it up without another word.

When they return to the flats, Jim bypasses Sherlock’s door, heading instead for the stairwell.  He doesn’t discourage Sherlock from following him up to his own flat, even as his expression slowly smooths and hardens by the step, bits of armor going back up.  Even if he had, Sherlock would have ignored it.  Jim’s energy today has been subdued at best, wrung-out, and Sherlock does not know the rules of this.  If going back to the site of the episode threatens to make Jim plummet again, Sherlock has every intention of being present to catch him this time, rather than only to peel him out of his own crater.

Jim makes a face at the state of his flat when they walk in, but simply steps over the broken things, narrowing his eyes at the formula scrawled from wall to wall.  He only looks for a moment before muttering with a twitch of his eyebrows, “Well, _that’s_ nonsense.”  He picks up a stack of torn-out textbook pages and begins to flip through them.  “Go away now, Sherlock.”

Sherlock eyes him, noting which parts of himself Jim seems to have turned off in order to manage this task.  Nothing vital, he doesn’t think, nothing likely to lead to another spiral.  “I’ll expect your visit this evening,” he says, allowing Jim to translate.   _I will be back here this evening if I suspect you’re not all right._

Jim gives a noncommittal hum, focused on the pages, and Sherlock turns to go, but pauses when Jim reaches back without looking and grabs his hand.  He barely squeezes it, just silently insisting on holding it for a moment without showing his face.  It looks similar enough to the Jim of last night, hiding, ashamed, that Sherlock cannot leave him here, standing in the wreckage with his head bowed.  He mustn't.  He tightens his grip and pulls, decisive without forcing, and Jim lets himself be tugged close, his eyes abruptly alert and searching.

When Sherlock takes his jaw and drops their foreheads together, calling on the previous night, a silent reminder for him to breathe, Jim goes rigid for a moment, not breathing at all.  Then the air leaves his lungs in a rush, and his arms are dropping the pages and wrapping around Sherlock’s neck, and it is not at all like the exhausted, barely-there embrace of the night before.  This embrace is powerful, almost painful, Jim’s fingers squeezing his shoulder and digging into his hair, his head shifting into the crook of Sherlock’s neck so he can pull their chests flush.  He grips him like he is a life preserver, like it is the most important movement his arms could make, and Sherlock cannot think of another moment when he has felt so very _necessary._

Embraces do not come naturally to him, but his arms are learning.  They find their way around Jim’s back and lock there the way they failed to last night, firm and tight, because Jim must know that he is necessary, too.  The seconds pass as they breathe through what might be their first truly proper embrace, hanging on too tightly, and Sherlock feels it more than hears it when Jim exhales into his neck like a prayer, “You’re me.”

Sherlock closes his eyes, pressing his lips to the crown of Jim’s head, the first time he has done so calmly and knowingly, not as the result of some surge of adrenaline or joyful surprise.  Only because he wanted to.  Because more and more, he is seeing that affection is necessary to Jim’s language, and if Sherlock is able to improve his fluency - to say _I will look after you, I choose to look after you,_ in Jim’s language, showing instead of telling as per his own language, bypassing spoken words in all their untrustworthiness - then he will do so.  In this context, in the context of Jim, touch makes sense.   _I am you.  You’re me._

“Yes,” he whispers back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So ends the holiday interlude. Next chapter, we will be back to our regularly scheduled programming. :)


End file.
